7 Tips for Building a Successful Career as a Wedding Photographer

With talent, technical skills, and determination, there’s no reason why you can’t build a lucrative and successful career as a wedding photographer.

Here are seven tips to help you on your way. 

1. Build Friendships with Your Clients

You should try to build up good relationships with the bride and groom ahead of the wedding day.

By doing so, they’ll be much more comfortable and natural in front of the camera, which means you can capture some amazing shots that both you and they will be happy with.

Furthermore, by building a friendship with the happy couple, they’re likely to recommend you to their friends and family.

2. Always Test Your Equipment

You only get one chance to take memorable photographs on a couple’s wedding day, so you need to make certain that everything goes according to plan and runs smoothly.

Rule number one is to test your equipment prior to the big day.

You’ll have to work quickly on the wedding day to get the required shots, adapt to changes in the wedding reception schedule, and cater to last-minute client requests, so make sure you spend time testing your equipment and taking practice shots ahead of time.

3. Be Prepared for Any Lighting Conditions

You should be ready to adapt your methods for any lighting conditions. After all, lighting conditions can change dramatically and quickly outside.

So, you should know how to master all kinds of lighting situations, including tricky ones.

If you can, you should scout the site of the wedding before the day so that you can assess the best places for lighting.

4. Scout the Best Locations for Pictures

Following on from the last point, you should scout the location of the wedding ahead of time if you can in order to find the best places to take pictures, rather than leaving it to the last minute.

By knowing where to take photographs and having an efficient route to follow that will help you get better images, everything will run on time, your clients will be happy, and you can take some truly fantastic shots of the happy couple, the guests, and things like the wedding cake.

5. Watermark the Digital Copies of Your Photos Before Sending Them to the Bride and Groom

When you take on board tips like those above, you’ll be able to build up an impressive portfolio.

But a career as a wedding photographer needs to be focused on the business side just as much as the creative side.

So, you need to take steps to protect your work and ensure guests actually purchase your photographs rather than downloading copies for free.

To protect your work, watermark each photo before you send the photographs to the bride and groom.

You don’t need to waste time watermarking each photo individually. Instead, you can use an online batch watermarker tool.

6. Promote Your Business

To build a successful career as a wedding photographer, you need to continually drum up business.

While word-of-mouth recommendations can certainly help you to get work, make sure you create an SEO-optimized website that will rank highly on search engines, promote your services online using ads and social media channel posts, advertise in wedding magazines, and target potential clients locally by advertising in newspapers and on billboards.

7. Develop Your Style and Your Portfolio

Once you have built up a great business, it’s time to focus on who you are as a photographer so that you can develop your own style and generate demand for your work.

You can then attract the types of clients you want to work with and ensure you have artistic satisfaction.

As long as you take note of the above tips and spend time putting together an incredible portfolio, you can get to a position in which you can charge more, gain artistic freedom, and attract the right clients.