eSign Wedding Photography Made Easy

E sign wedding photography

[Music] we're in the studio it's been a minute since we've been here we have a place that's about two hours north of here where all the ski hills are and if uh if i'm up there you see me recording videos in my car we're here in waterloo then i'm i'm in the studio here you don't need to know that i've been finalizing the presentation for bookmore weddings 2021 which is going to be a live stream out tomorrow at 2pm so if you're interested in getting bookmore weddings 2021 which is essentially a full breakdown of everything that i have been doing and everything that i will be doing over 2021 and specifically kind of looking at 2022. um some of the comments that i've been getting in both the youtube videos and i post some stuff on facebook as well as well as our members only facebook group people are a little concerned that 2021 is essentially just going to be exactly like 2020 was in a lot of places um that the speed of everything getting back to normal just really didn't pace and that people are still nervous to get married this year i'm here to tell you all of the good things and why last year even though there were a lot of really really terrible things why it was actually one of my more favorite years as a wedding photographer so as a wedding photographer what i like doing is i like taking the pictures i like to go out i like to do the photo part of the day i like to take all the beautiful images what i don't like is sitting down at dinner and doing nothing or capturing like scattered speech photos over the course of like five hours i don't really like that part of the day what 2020 kind of did was it removed that section so at least i'm speaking from my experience here in ontario canada which we limited groups i think to 50 at some point and now it's down to 10 i guess indoors but essentially what it did was it had all of my couples all the couples that still wanted to get married this year if they wanted to get married this year they really had the full ability to say like hey family we want you and these specific friends we would like to invite you to our wedding everyone else sorry but it's kind of an excuse it's a good excuse if you didn't want to have the big wedding and spend a lot of money what i liked as a photographer i guess this is very selfishly to to our industry that i got to go in i now got to do the getting ready coverage usually maybe a half hour 45 minutes very very efficient the ceremony the photo session and family photos and that was it i was there for the parts of the day that i enjoyed the most and i got to do that on a lot of random days so a lot of people that push their bigger receptions to next year which is um maybe even when you get pushed to 2022 now what happened was that when they pushed their their reception or their party date they didn't mind doing their actual ceremony on a tuesday or wednesday or thursday we saw this as things opened up a little bit in september october that a lot of the wedding photographers around here were just absolutely flooded with inquiries for just a bunch of strange and unusual dates that we would never really see so those monday tuesday friday weddings and saturdays as well became normal for a couple of weeks and i think i shot pretty close to the same volume that i would usually shoot on a normal year but pretty much all stacked between that september october early part of november time frame so everything happened really really fast uh for this year so i'll do an official count maybe if that matters at all but i'm i'm going to say i probably did 25 to 35 weddings just in september and october of this year and there's actually a micro if you're a member of the site there's a micro weddings course as well as an allotments course they're two separate individual courses alomen's kind of what i picture them to be is two people going off in a helicopter somewhere to go and do a thing um maybe not a helicopter you can just go walk somewhere that's nice or a restaurant or whatever it's a smaller smaller gathering a micro wedding is maybe up to 10 people maybe 20 30 whatever restrictions are allowed in your place in the world that's what i would consider to be a microwedding so i built two courses based on each of those if you're a member you get access to all my courses so maybe sign up if you're interested and also you get bookmore awareness 2021 which is coming out tomorrow and that's really what spawned today's video so looking at 2021 the positives that i see for wedding photographers if you are somebody that is looking to get into the industry one you're going to have so many opportunities because people are doing a number of weddings on non-saturdays so they're all through the week so you get to work all the time if you want but they're also smaller days which the positive is you get to build your portfolio out way faster and way larger than you ever could on a normal year the negative is obviously that maybe you're not going to be getting that 12-hour pricing that it's now going to be a three or four hour day rather than the 16 hour day where you get there at sunrise and stay until after midnight but as far as portfolio and as far as investing in the future growth of your business if you can be photographing a lot of small weddings this year i guess the other positive is the same thing happened 2020 that a lot of the day is now just around the couple and that means that your couple's photo session one there they seem to be a lot more natural it's a lot easier for me to get people from that initial like okay it's our photo session time what do we do tell us what to do with our hands to just them being normal there's less stress of the day people are just like kind of it's almost i think the the situation is so far out of control that they're just kind of like i'm happy to be here with you and our family and that's all that i really wanted for our wedding day people seem to be able to get in the headspace of just enjoying that moment a lot more maybe that's something that 2020 has kind of taught us to really appreciate the people in your life and i can see that coming through in the images a lot better so uh that is maybe one of the the big positives the other big positive is obviously that this year is a portfolio building year like no other um and you will also be collecting deposits from 2022 couples i feel like a lot of people were very very hesitant to book if they got engaged over last year very very hesitant to book a date this year uh 2022 seems a lot more reasonable so i think that everything that we kind of predicted for this 2021 being double the year i think that's going to be 2022 and i think that 2021 is going to be your portfolio building year where you get to invest that time into yourself to really create an amazing portfolio to market into that 2022. uh same rules apply the same things that i kind of talked about the most established wedding photographers are likely already going to be booked every saturday every prime saturday so if you are somebody that's looking to fill up those saturday dates know that most of the established folks in your local area are probably already booked so there's going to be a lot more people just almost not necessarily desperately maybe desperately if they've contacted like four people and they're all booked for their date but by the time they actually inquire with you they're going to be a lot faster to book with you they're going to be increasingly unlikely to ghost you so when they inquire you respond with pricing and um if you're a member again you get the welcome kit so you can make your own beautiful welcome kit to send to them which seems to help with retention quite a lot um in the in the first couple of emails but this really is the year to invest in yourself and your craft this also means setting up shoots if you're able to i guess this all goes with within the legal of wherever you are set up as many shoots as you can set up shoots with couples like everybody's just spent the past year pretty much together with their their partner so figure out a way to get those couples out for photos whether another thing i guess that i've noticed another huge positive over 2020 is if you are a family photographer if you're doing really any sort of family work you probably saw an increase in sales to the tune of something like 300 400 percent um if you are marketing and and kind of seeing that this was like oh this is working i should keep at this um as far as mini sessions go i feel like most people sold out mini sessions a lot faster and for more money and saw more more after sales than ever before this year so know that the focus is coming back to family so maybe maybe another takeaway from this is to to make sure that if you are interested in also having a family element to your wedding photography company it might make sense at this point if it is something you're going to pursue to start a separate web page for it to separate your wedding work and your family work they do blend together like you can do it on the same page if you want but i feel like if you can show that you specialize in two different things and you have two completely different storefronts for it i do i do feel like it's a better thing overall um as far as running two instagrams i probably wouldn't necessarily do that but i would have two different websites that you can send people to that when they come to your blog it's a family specific blog and doesn't have any weddings on it but family photos and sales of those prints afterwards have been i'll actually probably make a mini session style course at some point and put it up on the member site because i think it is something that really it worked very well years past but it worked exceptionally well this year that is all for my thoughts on why 2021 is going to be a fantastic year for your wedding photography business if you want to build portfolio in a rapid way this is the year to do it if you want to redesign your portfolio if you're just not happy with a your portfolio or b potentially the style of clients that you're attracting if you want to completely redesign everything that your wedding photography business is this is the year that those options are available and you don't have to be the ones setting up all the shoots that there is going to be more than enough work for you coming in you're able to actually piece together a whole new portfolio and by september october of this year when 2022 inquiries are starting to come in very very heavily you are going to have a completely different portfolio that's going to attract your ideal client in a new way which means your 2022 is going to be absolutely amazing for your business and for your for your mental health as well i think one of the biggest steps that i took in my business was really to focus on who my ideal client was and to make sure that i was booking specifically them every single time it felt really really weird in the beginning to be like oh you're getting married so i guess to preface what my ideal client is there's somebody that's getting married kind of close to here if they're getting married downtown toronto i'm kind of hesitant to take that booking i don't it's not mentally it's a lot of stress for me it's a lot of stress on the day it's a lot of stress leading up to the day it's a lot of stress i guess that's all but it's like if i book a downtown toronto wedding and i know it's going to be a busy day or i know that there's going to be like a marathon or something happening on that day i very much stress out about that in some way the entire year leading up to that wedding so i discovered that shooting locally close to home selecting the venues that i enjoy working at that i enjoy the staff at as well i think that's another a weird thing that i just kind of enjoy knowing everyone when i go in there so i really kind of tuned back and selected which venues i work at specifically i obviously will take outliers but for the most part i'm working kind of at the same venues um and my ideal clients tend to go towards those venues so maybe that's a little bit of a wedding photography life hack that i accidentally figured out was that you're as a photographer if your couple's serious about photography you're probably second second downs so they're gonna book the venue whatever venue they connect the most with so that's a pretty good litmus test at the beginning that if they connect well with this specific venue there's i would say an 80 chance that they're going to be a much more ideal client or at least like that 80 percent plus ideal client that i'm more than happy to work with so that's kind of what i discovered and i really decided to double down on that and started turning away weddings in other places if if i had enough lead time if it was a request for a year and a half from now i would maybe tell them that i was booked and i would hope that a wedding would come in for one of these venues locally and fortunately for me that worked really well that was a bit of a risk in the beginning but it did turn out really well and i would say my life happiness as a wedding photographer is much much happier now that i only do the things that i enjoy doing i think this is reflected in my work and my presence on the day and just how excited i am to be at every single wedding so maybe something to think about we'll get a lot deeper over 2021 about designing your ideal lifestyle lifestyle design i think i don't know who coined it maybe tim ferriss somebody just kind of came up with this term lifestyle design and it's all about figuring out what you want your life to be and then figuring out the pieces required to create that ideal life so i think that's a strange way that not a lot of us actually come into the wedding photography industry but i think does have a lot of value that's all for today if you're interested in getting book more weddings 2021 it will be live streamed tomorrow at 2 p.m uh eastern time so if you're a member you have access to if you're not a member there's a link in the description below for you to come over and to watch that it is a full course or like a full day-long workshop all baked into two hours total and then we're gonna do a live q a at the end so maybe keep any questions you have maybe write them down on notepad or on your phone or whatever and keep them for the end and i will be getting to as many of those questions as i possibly can um and then i might even do uh like i'll just kind of screencap the what's happening in the chat and i might do a podcast or something extended on any of the questions that i don't get and include that as a bit of a bonus on the in the members site so thank you so much for being here and hopefully this made your relax your nerves a little bit about 2021 if you are nervous about what this year might entail know that it is going to be an incredible portfolio building year so make sure that you're aware of that and you're aware of the opportunity it's getting sunny here it's cloudy and icy all day sunny now i'm going to go out into the world and not do anything because everything is closed unfortunately thanks for being here don't forget to subscribe see you uh tomorrow on the live stream 2 pm eastern sign up description below links that's all see you from the studio