Whew! We've just come off of a crazy wedding season! We've posted a whopping 30 real weddings here on the blog in the past year including some weddings from the past eight years and we're currently in our 9th year of full-time professional wedding photography. Who are we, though...? We're a real-life couple: Jenny and Jason. We have 3 rescue pets: an elderly cat Kevin, an elderly rabbit Marco, and a spry greyhound mix dog Coco. You could maybe say that we love animals. Though we don't have kids, over the years in South Bend Jenny has dedicated her time (25% of the year) to volunteer coaching middle school volleyball with the same team annually. We live and work in South Bend, Indiana and live and breathe photography... for the most part. We enjoy hikes, annual visits to family out West, traveling abroad, collecting antiques, and creating bizarre art. Coming up at the end of this summer we'll even be starting our 5th year together! The years have taken us from moving to 3 states (California, Michigan, & Indiana) to in 2016 finally owning our own studio, Consultation Office, and Editing Office. Oh, and here's a photo of our family- the 5 of us- across the street from our house this past year. (We live on a river here in Indiana! Just one perk of no neighbors across the street.):
Coming up we'll be attending the best photographic educator conference in the nation (SPE) in Philly in about 3 weeks and we're excited to continue learning and growing. We're also excited about the weddings that we'll be capturing this year (and we're looking forward to more 2018 and 2019 weddings), but right now we want to jump right into it and share with you what you deserve out of a Professional Photography Business!
What to Look for in a Professional Photography BUSINESS (L.L.C.):
1) Professionalism: TWO photographers with an actual L.L.C. business and almost 10 years of Wedding Photography under their belts.
2) Education: Highly trained professionals with formal photography educations i.e. degrees from universities and art schools that give out BFAs and MFAs. (Can YOUR wedding photographer teach university classes or brilliantly Photoshop you into a Star Wars scene...?)
3) Love: It takes a REAL couple to work with a couple.
4) Products: Hundreds of BEAUTIFUL, professionally printed photo products & a handmade box to keep your favorite photographs in!
5) Service: Ease of mind knowing that your Wedding Photographers can build your entire wedding day schedule AND capture you from the most gorgeous angles. Knowing that your photographers will always meet with you in person, have a great contract, process any type of payment method (or payment plan), would NEVER double book you, and will edit your images within weeks (and within less than 2 months at the height of wedding season).
6) Trust: Knowing that your images are backed up for 10+ years 5 various ways (in many different places) with our trustworthy and reliable company.
Professionalism: First thing's first: Yes, your niece can photograph well, but a hobby of photography is A MILLION times different than running a legitimate business. A full-time wedding photography business/ company books ideally about 12 to 25 weddings a year and the "Wedding Season" runs most heavily from April or May through October or November. The average number of weddings captured per year differs a bit because some photographers charge far too little (due to the very few years of experience and lack of education in the field) and must shoot double or triple as many as more established photographers who charge much more for their high quality of work (thus not needing to photograph as many a year). Ideally a photographer at a professional level as such will be registered as an LLC: A real business that files taxes, pays for gear/ software updates, has expenses, etc. Photographers at lower levels may have other jobs or spouses to pay the bills, thus may not be an L.L.C. and may write their profits on their personal tax forms since they may not consider themselves a legitimate business.
Photography is a luxury service AND photos are meant to be tangible items, but there's a range of quality when it comes to BOTH the products and service. It's pretty easy for most of us to tell the quality of imagery when we see it, but there's also a quality of service and products that go along with photography. In terms of service with anything you're going to invest in, you likely want someone who's been in the business for a LONG time, is the most educated in what they're doing (so they can do and deal with literally ANYTHING you ask of them- service-wise, in capturing the image/ perfect angles, AND editing anything with ease), and is easy to work with! We deeply believe in making our clients' lives as easy as possible while also being able to create literally anything and everything imaginable.
A large portion of wedding photography is SERVICE and the other portion are the PRODUCTS. "Service" means that you're there to serve and keep the clients happy and keep everything running smoothly. Though we have our BFA and MFA in commercial and fine art photography (two completely different worlds), this is something that's NOT taught in school. This desire to keep people laughing and having a great time is something innate within a personality. The two of us are a real couple in love and work together equally EVERY photo session (from capturing couples at a wedding to Infant to Senior Portraits to Family Portraits to Pet Portraits) and by this our 9th year we know what will make people comfortable and what poses/ directing will help our clients get comfortable and remain calm and happy. We also (unlike many photographers we've encountered) respect those around us whether that be another wedding party, a family out in public, etc. because we truly believe that EVERY human deserves respect. This also reflects onto our clients: We treat each couple, family, and individual equally giving NO favor to higher paying clients or those we personally know. We keep things fair with set prices on the packages we offer and do NOT give discounts to those we know OR to those who waited until later to hire a wedding photographer.
Then there are the PRODUCTS of wedding photography. When it comes to products, we think we hit it out of the park. Many photographers (if not all?) in our area are "Shoot and Burn" which means that they photograph your event and hand you a DVD, USB, or link with your edited images, then they often delete your images and wash their hands of it. Not us, though! With the training and educational degrees in photography and professional photographic printing we believe that each individual photo needs to be edited thoroughly- from taking out stop signs in images, to color correcting, to lightening some areas in the image- we truly believe that the next step to a quality photo product is a fully edited image. Next we finish the process since a photograph is only FINISHED when it's printed onto some substrate: We deliver literally hundreds of ACTUAL (professionally printed) PHYSICAL PHOTOS to every single client! There's no low quality from CVS, Walgreens, and whatnot here-! For weddings we deliver hundreds of images, beautiful products, and even beautiful, huge, thick physical wedding albums you cannot order from places like Shutterfly. We've personally tested these products for 7 years in galleries, our studio, and our Consultation Office to see what not only looks the BEST, but what holds up and lasts throughout time.
It wouldn't make sense to only go half of the way and deliver unfinished work that will likely be sitting in a USB that will become outdated. The mark of an actual photo studio is substantial: Real, finished work. With "Shoot & Burn" style photography the job lies upon the client to finish the process. Before we rebranded 3 years ago we noticed that our wedding photography USBs that we'd given clients 5 years prior sat and collected dust on a shelf and our past clients never did anything with their images because it's quite an undertaking to cull through all of the images and design physical albums or buy quality prints. Those who take it upon themselves to print the images always come out with sub-par, cheap products. Our work is of high professional quality from professionally calibrated, huge photo printers ensuring that our (and YOUR) physical products are of the highest physical quality.
We are very hands-on about everything we design, print, & create. Our boxes are all handmade (NOT churned out by Michael's or a corporation) and we hand stain, seal, and engrave every single one of our clients' beautiful wooden keepsake boxes. These unique creations we make are handmade with love from us to hold all of the beautiful photos and memories of one of the most special days of many peoples' lives: Their wedding day. You can trust that we put 200% of ourselves into every single step of the process and into the quality of our photo products themselves.
As always, thank you for taking a few minutes to take a look at this week's blog and read about the services and expertise that we offer. Hopefully you found this post informative and maybe even learned a few things. We love what we do and truly want to create to the best of our abilities for each and every one of our clients. In this age of digital overload we're glad to still be a source of the timeless and tangible and look forward to creating high quality and archival photographic products for years to come.
Until next time.
Best,
Jenny and Jason