I’ve started another blog: The Wedding Photography Blog. To begin with there won’t be much there that’s new to PooterGeek readers: it’s an advert for my photography services. You will have seen many of the photos on show here or on my other sites like Sepial.com. My initial aim is to elevate Sepial’s Google karma in advance of the site’s expansion. The Wedding Photography Blog is already a top hit on Google for “wedding photography blog“.
There’s more to it than that though. It’s also a Danickian experiment in turning conversations with people into mutually rewarding business. I’m going to see if I can be freakishly honest with potential customers and still make money. I have started and will continue to do some perverse things:
- give away my “trade secrets”,
- link to my best rivals,
- admit that my work can be improved, and
- tell clients that they can do my job (if they practise).
If you like taking photos and would like to know how to take better photos then the blog will, I hope, give you some useful tips. If you just like looking at photos (especially of weddings) then it will give you plenty of nice pics to gawp at. If you are interested in marketing and this all goes horribly wrong then it might just give you a car-crash of a case to study.
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I agree that film is still better than digital. My flickr friend Swerve is passionate in his belief that – with the right lens(es) and camera – digital is every bit as good. But I’ve looked through old photo albums and the way that light is captured on film is significantly different – and better. My old albums are filled with much better photos than my more recent digital efforts.
Still, I’m not a pro and I’ve been 100% digital for a while now, mainly because I love the freedom to take hundreds and hundreds of shots in order to end up with the equivalent of a 36-frame roll of good/great photos. It’s just a lot cheaper than my old habit of shooting 4 or 5 rolls on a holiday and paying for them to be developed.
But, if I was a professional, I’d be using film, like you. The big selling point to potential customers is that the original negatives will always be there if more prints are required. Digital formats are subject to the whims of failing hard drives, degrading optical media, careless deletion, and the inevitable obsolescence brought on by new formats. If I was getting married and wanted my wedding photos to last forever, I’d want a photographer who used film.
Last year, my wife and I scanned a load of her old family photos, going back decades (to the earliest days of photography), and it struck me all over again the huge risk that little of what we photograph digitally will end up being preserved for 50 and 100 years.
Apologies for length.
The honesty approach to business is refreshing and might actually work. I tried the whole ‘linking to my rivals‘ and telling everyone how cool they are on the business blog recently and it’s already paying dividends.
Interesting. I found you by searching mad marketing in google.
Handily for my marketing purposes I am also currently in the top ten on Google UK for “free postcards“.