Free Wedding Photo Search! Enter Your Topic Below:

12. Getting Started in Business

The good candid wedding photographer (often called the "following pho­tographer" by the public) is partly born and partly made. The necessary ingredients are experience and the heart of an amateur. To start out, shoot a lot of flash: parties, babies, family groups—anything! You will be in luck if you can find an experienced candid man willing to have you shoot, along with him, on several of his weddings. Then do at least five or six weddings on your own for friends or relatives who do not wish to incur the expense of professional pictures. Do not mislead them as to your ability, and charge only for materials. Do not shoot for profit until you are absolutely sure you can produce re­sults that approach professional standards. Nothing can compensate for wed­ding pictures that did not "turn out." Wedding photos are "for keeps." Develop your own negatives and do your own printing. This is the only satisfactory method for learning to judge the accuracy of your exposures and for learning to adjust the contrast of your film to suit your particular paper and enlarger.

The Weekend Candid Photographer

Your next logical step is to hang on to your regular job, whatever it is, and do candid weddings on weekends. Many photographers find this a source of welcome additional income, as well as an excellent transition step towards doing candid photography full-time.

Most of the business material in Chapter 13 will apply to you, as well as the man shooting candid weddings on a full-time basis.

People in small towns soon get to know the man shooting candid wed­dings on his weekends. Most of his work will come through recommendation. To the more enterprising, the extra labor of checking the local paper for engagement announcements will provide a list of leads, for contact by mail, telephone, or by dropping in with samples. If the quality of your work is good and the prices right, you will get your share of weddings.

In the larger town or in cities, the situation is not this simple. Every con­ceivable angle is exploited by the full-time studios. Bucking them would be an almost complete waste of time. Your work will have to come through recom­mendation and people you know who are getting married—and people are get­ting married all the time! Weddings in New York City (population about 8,000,000) are about 68,000 a year; in Newark, N.J., (population about 450,000), 5,000 a year; in Elizabeth, N.J. (population about 113,000), 1,200 a year.

Another Solution

For the photographer who does not care to sacrifice his weekends in shooting and his evenings in the darkroom processing and printing, shooting Saturdays and Sundays for studios is the answer. The general pay is $15 to $20 for a wedding, plus five to ten cents per shot for use of his electronic flash, and about five cents per mile car expense for the more distant weddings.

Candids are the life-blood of portrait studios; not many can exist without them. The busier the studio the greater their dependence on the free-lance candid wedding photographer. Visit their studios and show them a sample of your wedding work. If it is good, you will get plenty of calls. Good photog­raphers are at a premium.

Going into Business—The Next Step

Now you have shot quite a few weekend weddings and you're feeling your photographic oats. In fact, you think you're good. Of late, somewhere in the back of your mind has been a vague but persistent notion about going into business for yourself. Candid wedding photography, of course!

Remember that inexperience and incompetence are prime causes of busi­ness failure. Some years ago I visited a friend at his place of business. The store—one of the larger in town—had been started by his father. Our conversa­tion turned to the early and trying days of their business. What, I asked his father, did most to contribute to his success? He thought a moment. "The ex­perience I gained from two previous business failures and the fact that I seldom make the same mistake twice."

This year about 13,000 business firms of all sorts will fail in this country. Their creators had the same high hopes and aspirations you have. Most of these failures will wipe out their owners and seriously affect their families. These are the cold hard facts. On the credit side of the picture is the 54 per­cent of businesses that will exist beyond the five-year period. And you have every right to think that yours will be one of these. There is only one way to find out!

A Practical Approach

To the not easily discouraged my advice is: Get a job with a local studio. If you can, choose one whose work you admire. Avoid one with many em­ployees or you may find yourself stuck with one job for a long time, perhaps a rudimentary one of washing and drying prints. Avenues of learning will be limited and your progress slow.

66. The breaking of bread (opposite, top) is a ceremony which is customary at the beginning of the dinner following the Jewish wedding. It is one of the shots which you should get for the album. (Rolleifiex; Tri-X; 60 tv/s electronic flash unit, 1 1200 second, f/8; film developed in Microdol.) 67. Gag shots (opposite, lower) such as this one of the couple kissing while the best man or an usher holds a watch as if to time them, are included in the coverage of many weddings. Always remember that the shots you take are intended for their albumand should reflect their taste. (Retina 11a;Plm-X; No. 5 bulb, 1/200, f/11; developed in Microdol.) 68. The wedding coverage should in­clude a shot of the bride feeding wedding cake to the groom, the groom feeding cake to the bride or a picture of them feeding each other. The picture above is unusual in the vigor with which the bride is feeding the groom. You should always be alert for these unexpected happenings. (Busch Pressman; Tri-X; 80 w/s electronic flash, 1/200, f/16; DK-50.)

A studio with one or two employees affords a greater opportunity for you to become a part of all its functions. Your duties will be varied. The average studio handles child and adult portraiture, wedding photography and com­mercial work. You will develop negatives, see how negatives are retouched, make prints and do print finishing. Part of your work may even include the important business end of ordering supplies, selling and bookkeeping. You will learn how a studio is operated—by doing just that!

In the meantime you can put what you have learned into practice by tak­ing on wedding jobs in your spare time. Of course this work on your own time must not in any way conflict with the studio's business. At the same time gather all the business facts you can. For advice talk to your local Chamber of Commerce and to your bank. Write to Eastman Kodak Co., Ansco, DuPont and the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

The Final Step

When will you be ready to go on your own? You'll know. I'd say about the time you think you can do everything as well as your employer—or maybe better. Tread cautiously. Think back to the days before you had this practical studio experience. You've learned a lot since. You have a lot more to learn!

Your next step? That depends on the size of your ambition and the amount of money you have. Several months rent as security usually is required by most landlords for desirable locations. Unless you are handy with tools and can do much of the work yourself, I would say you need a minimum of two to four thousand dollars for a presentable studio if no major alterations (such as rebuilding window fronts) are contemplated. There is plumbing, electrical work, painting, partitions, and purchase of drapes, rugs, studio furniture, files, sinks, to mention only the obvious. Photographic equipment, of course, is extra.

After you have figured all your studio costs, add what you will need to support yourself and your dependents for a minimum of six months. Your business may not be self-supporting for this long a period—maybe longer.

Your studio doors are open. Now you will have to do everything your former employer did and maybe more. (See Chapter 13 on Business.) Every month or so you will have to change the pictures in your window or display case. You will have to explore the possibilities of advertising: newspaper, magazine, direct mail, handbills, billboard, and in smaller towns where the cost is not prohibitive, radio. There is no set pattern. A medium of advertising that does well in one locality may be ineffective in another. Your local Cham­ber of Commerce should be able to advise which mediums have proved the most effective in your community.

An alternative to the higher rent downstairs studio is an upstairs location, preferably with a display space on the ground floor. For the man whose funds are limited but whose determination is not, a happy compromise is a house that can serve as studio and residence.

69. The cake cutting shot is important. However, one with this much anima­tion is the exception. Usually the couple is placed so that the wall behind the bridal table is the background. Shoot from about 10 feet. Detail in the cake and modeling on the couple will be improved by raising the gun high over your head. Do not hold the flash gun to the left or right as this may produce bad shadows from one or another of the subjects or from the cake itself. Try to separate the couple's hands from the cake so the latter may be burned in during printing without blackening the hands. For the photograph above 1 had been tipped off that the pigeons would be released so I stood about 20 to 25 feet back from the cake. (In printing, the non-essentials have been cropped out.) I used a No. 5 flashbulb because electronic flash would have frozen the movement of the birds and produced a static result. The camera was a Busch Pressman; the film, Tri-X developed in DK-50. The shutter set­ting was 1/100 second at f/5.6.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here….