So, as a wedding photographer, you’re on board with using guests’ snapshots, you’ve been thinking of strategies of how to do so and you’ve begun to think of guests as friendly allies. Great! The next step: Address the “FaceBook Factor.”

What I’m calling the “FaceBook Factor” came sharply to my attention during my own wedding experience. Within 24 hours of my saying “I do” (or Si, to be more exact), all kinds of great images made by guests started showing up on FaceBook.

This experience got me thinking about the exciting clash of traditional, professional wedding photography services and social media-savvy wedding guests armed with point-and-shoot cameras. This clash should give all wedding photographers pause, but in a good way — in a way that leaves us excited about the possibilities of embracing new “competition” in the best (and most profitable) ways.

As I’m made clear in my three earlier posts in this series, I think we need to embrace the idea of using the snapshots made by guests. But using such images is just the beginning. The real challenge is how to best use them (and our own images) in relation to how our clients are using social media.

FaceBook and Other Social Media Distribution Channels

Really, this goes beyond FaceBook. It’s about Wedding Photography 2.0 in the sense that clients will continue to desire more from their wedding photographers in terms of helping them share images as quickly and as widely as possible via the Web. Although I predict that all clients will want (and eventually demand) such social media support services, they will want these services handled in unique ways that match their personalities.

This will require photographers to be savvy and flexible, and keep on top of the latest social media tools and trends.

Some clients will be super savvy in terms of social media, and will welcome with gusto a photographer who is thinking in terms of tweets, blogs, Facebook and other social media outlets.

Some clients will be social media nincompoops, but will heartily welcome the advice, guidance and support of photographers who can help them keep up with the times in terms of sharing their wedding with not only family and guests, but their worldwide network of Web-based friends and colleagues.

Beginning to think strategically about FaceBook and other modern means of sharing wedding images will allow photographers to (positively) embrace the “FaceBook Factor,” and not get (negatively) blindsided by it.

Put FaceBook on the Table for Clients

A simple way to begin to positively address the “FaceBook Factor” can take place during planning meetings with clients. Talk to them about ideas and expectations, offering suggestions and brainstorming with them as you get a feel for how to best support them.

You might discover that some clients want you to become FaceBook friends and post a down-and-dirty gallery for them within 24 hours of their wedding, while quality proofs are still in the works.

This might be too informal for many clients. However, most clients will likely appreciate you emailing them 10 or 20 or 50 low-res, down-and-dirty proof files within 24 hours of the wedding. Then they themselves can post them to FaceBook while on their honeymoon.

Sure, this kind of service will not appeal to all clients. Older couples especially might be more traditional (and maybe you are, too). Maybe “down-and-dirty,” low-res images is exactly the opposite of what they want from their professional photographer. But you have to ask to find out.

And, I don’t think I’m a brilliant futurist to propose that every passing year will see more couples who do want these kind of “FaceBook Factor” services. The time is now to get ready for the next generation of wedding couples. Think of this: No couple today under the age of 25 knows a world without the Web.

Wedding Photographers as Social Media Coordinators

Thoughts I have been sharing about “Wedding Photography 2.0″ are not about any specific technology, such as FaceBook. What this is really about is the fast evolution of photography specifically in relation to the way non-professionals are sharing photography through social media distribution channels like FaceBook, Flickr, Picasa, MySpace and blogs.

The technology will continue to change, but it aint never going to slow down, and we are never going to return to a moment when wedding photographers are just needed to perform the invaluable service of documentation.

Perhaps the single, best way to think of the Wedding Photography 2.0 themes I have brought up is for wedding photographers to begin to think of themselves as a kind of social media wedding photography coordinator.

For example, beyond simply putting FaceBook on the table for clients in terms of providing images, you might help clients set up a FaceBook page specific to their wedding.

For example, beyond just simply helping clients include guests’ snaps in their album, you might help them create a blog specific to their wedding.

How about helping clients figure out how to automatically tweet blog posts related to their wedding? (Post which, of course, include your images and links to your photography site.)

How about helping clients build community in the virtual world around the very real photography that has been captured in the very real world?

Wedding Photography Success Beyond The Photography

It’s likely that at the next wedding you photograph there will be dozens of people clicking away with point-and-shoots camera and cell phones, making hundreds of images. It’s very unlikely that your clients would love to see the best of these images, as well as yours.

The creative business question for wedding photographers: How can you best help your clients see these images and distribute them using social media — in a way that increases the value of your services?

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Click here for Part I of this series.

Click here for Part II of this series.

Click here for Part III or this series.

Tags: Adding Value to Wedding Photography, Business of Photography, Creative Business Strategies, Easy Ways to Expand Wedding Photography Services, FaceBook, Marketing Strategies, Rethinking the Business of Photography, Wedding Photography, Wedding Photography 2.0, Wedding Photography and New Media

“As professionals, we need to rethink the way we do business,” Reid Mason wrote in response to my post about the value of including guests’ snapshots in wedding photography services. “I think this is a way of going the extra distance to give clients what they want.”

As made clear in my post (and my follow-up post offering some strategies for integrating guests’ images), I totally agree with Reid’s sentiments.

Unlike Reid, I imagine that many wedding photographers will reject the idea of using guests’ photographs. As Ben commented when I shared a few guest snaps from my wedding, “If those are better than the professional photographer’s images then you should have hired a better photographer!”

When judging photographs and the photographers who make them, “better” is totally subjective. And if you are photographing weddings where guests are snap, snap, snapping away, my guess is that many of your clients would like to see those images — best presented, best integrated into your services.

So assuming you are a wedding photographer open to the possibilities of using guests’ snaps, one of the very real issues (if fundamentally emotional) you will likely wrestle is this: But won’t the guests mind?

The Guests Won’t Mind!, The Couple Will be Grateful!
Does asking wedding guest for copies of their photos seem like “stealing” or “cheating”? If you are a professional photographer, it probably does. If nothing else, it will seem awkward, counter intuitive and simply not professional

To overcome getting guests involved, I believe the key thing to remember — as FaceBook proves daily — is that, at least when it comes to photography, this is the Sharing Generation. Making, sharing and commenting on photographs is an increasingly communal activity.  The “©” symbol so dear to intellectually-property-defending professional photographers just doesn’t seem to register with any significance to casual, click-happy photographers.

Photographs are made to share!

I am convinced that wedding guests asked (in an appropriate manner) by the professional photographer to contribute to the event documentation will be thrilled — especially if they understand that this is the wish of the wedding couple.

In fact, this thrill factor could be seen as an added value service professional photographers can offer clients — by helping them include the photography efforts of their snap-happy friends and family.

Keeping Track of Who Shot Whom: Smart File Naming

With a little bit of thoughtful digital asset management, there are easy ways that photographers can keep proper credit for each photographer — whether or not it is important to guests or clients.

The system that I am now playing with relies on a simple, clean file naming convention. I’m still working it out, but at this point I suggest you simply add initials for each photographer directly within the file name.

Yes, metadata can be used instead of (or in addition to) this method. But for now, my thought is that, as in multi-photographer photojournalism events, having the photographer’s ID right in the file name is most practical.

For example, file naming might look like this:

• Jones Wedding_0001_es.jpg = photographed by the pro, Yours Truly, Ethan Salwen.

• Jones Wedding_0002_ms.jpg = clicked by guest Meryl Streep

• Jones Wedding_0003_tc.jpg = this one captured on the iPhone of Tom Cruise!

• Jones Wedding_0004_es.jpg = back to Ethan

• Jones Wedding_0005_jd.jpg = I din’t even know Johnny Depp was there!

• Jones Wedding_0006_es.jpg = again, back to Ethan

Six images, four photographers, one simple, clean naming convention — all lined up chronologically. (See strategies in Part II.)

Wedding Guests Are Good Competition
So, um, what happens if my client loves 02 by Meryl, 03 by Tom and 05 by Johnny and, um, are not so fond of my 01, 04 and 06? This, of course, could happen, and will happen to a certain extent. And this, understandably, could make many wedding photographers uneasy. But I think the unease is unwarranted.

Two reasons why the more guest photographers, the merrier:

#1: Competition is good. If we are scared of healthy competition, we shouldn’t be in the business. Or stated less negatively: guest photographers are not “bad” competition. These are not other pros stealing the show or undermining our profits. These are “competitors” in the good sense: keeping us on our game, pushing us to make the best images we possible can, images that prove our value as pros.

#2: Our clients won’t mind — at all. Sure, a snarky client could say, “Why the hell did I hire you when I had Meryl, Tom and Johnny doing all the work?!?” But do you really want to work for someone like this? And, it’s not really going to happen. Clients will totally appreciate that we are delivering images from the Meryl, Tom and Johnnys of the wedding — in a way that they can best enjoy — and providing our stunning images, and delivering all of these diverse images in one, stunning package that documents their wedding better than any single photographer ever could.

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Click here for Part I of this series.

Click here for Part II of this series.

Click here for Part IV of this series.

Tags: Adding Value to Wedding Photography, Business of Photography, Creative Business Strategies, Easy Ways to Expand Wedding Photography Services, FaceBook, Marketing Strategies, Rethinking the Business of Photography, Wedding Photography, Wedding Photography 2.0, Wedding Photography and New Media

In my last post, refering to the practice (somewhat vauagely) as “Wedding Photography 2.0,” I suggested that wedding photographers should consider how to use the images made by wedding guests’ to expand their services to clients. Heck, if the pictures are being made, and if you are are in the business of delivering the most attractive wedding photography packages possible, how can you not consider using guests’ images?

Continuing with the idea, here I offer some practical strategies I’ve been mulling over on how to best do this.

Careful Planning Is The Key To Using Guests’ Photographs

I’m not going to offer a clear, one-size-fits all game plan for how to leverage wedding guests’ images. For one thing, I’m just being to play with this idea myself, still tyring to sort out the images from multiple friends from my own wedding. More important, no one-size-fits-all workflow strategy exists. What’s important is for each wedding photographer to address this kind of service in a way that fits best with their own personality and their clients’ needs.

However, one thing is clear: careful planning is critical to make this work!

I didn’t plan on securing and organizing gobs of images from different photographer-friends, and I’m suffering for it. It was a major pain to get my non-techie friends to FTP me all their images, and now I’m realizing — derr! — that handling digital asset management from multiple sources is not easy. (How may of your friends have the clock on their cameras set correctly?!)

So, if you like my Wedding Photography 2.0 idea, think carefully about what kind of integration you want to offer, plan ahead carefully and then test, test, test before first delivering services to a paying client.

Basic Business and Workflow Strategies:

• The most important step is to discuss this kind of service with clients early. Explain the advantages, how it might work, and exactly what they might like to see happen — from interaction with guests to products delivered. (If your clients are not interested, no big deal. You’ve shown that you are a forward-thinking, customer-oriented Web 2.0 photographer, and now you can focus on your traditional approach in a relaxed manner.)

• Put a number of your own point-and-shoots around the wedding event location, and invite guests to use them. This novelty approach of documenting weddings was becoming popular toward the end of film days — especially with disposable cameras. But the modern, digital point-and-shoot has incredible advantages over a throw-away film camera. Not only do (even cheep) digital point-and-shoots take fantastic pictures, but a smart workflow will allow you to easy integrate these images into your main images.

It also helps that these days everyone is totally comfortable click, click, clicking away with modern point-and-shoots. So some really great images are almost guarunteed.

The more point-and-shoots you can provide (buying used ones is a small investment), the less you will have to deal with dowloading guests’ memory cards.

• Explain to guests what’s going on. There are any number of ways to do this, but what’s important is to do so in a way that best supports the couple’s vision of the wedding. You want the guests to be pleased and excited to be part of the process, not thrown off by a photographer asking for thier images.

Perhaps your clients will be eager to email guest with a heads up. Perhaps they would prefer to keep this mellow and off the radar. In this case, with your client’s permission, you might simply elect to talk to the most snap-happy guests at the right, least-intrusive moment.

• Ask guests to photograph your watch or a clock at some point during the event. This will allow you to alter capture time metadata so that all images share the same “time reality.” This will allow you to be able to organize all images from all shooters in exact chronological order. Having this time stamp reference will be big help, and the “photograph my watch” method keeps you from having to ask guests to set their camera’s time correctly before the wedding.

• Create an “image download station” at the reception. If nothing else, you can download cards from individual guest and dump them into folders with each person’s name like — and then deal with the images later.

Clearly it would be majorly helpful to have an assistant handle this download process for you.

With or without an assistant, there are ways that you could set up a ingestion program like Photo Mechanic to handle ingestion in a more advanced way, putting in each guest’s basic metadata, smoothing later workflow issues.

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Click here for Part I of this series.

Click here for Part III or this series.

Click here for Part IV of this series.

Tags: Adding Value to Wedding Photography, Business of Photography, Creative Business Strategies, Easy Ways to Expand Wedding Photography Services, FaceBook, Marketing Strategies, Rethinking the Business of Photography, Wedding Photography, Wedding Photography 2.0, Wedding Photography and New Media

In January I stated that wedding photographers matter more than ever before and then in February I offered three reasons why wedding photographers don’t matter anymore. What’s the deal?

If you read that second post carefully, you’ll notice that what I was really trying to do was raise a question I believe critical to all wedding photographers. I asked:

How do today’s wedding photographers provide services that best compliment the (free and awesome) efforts of the couple’s family and friends?

Embracing Guests’ Snapshots

This question arose from my experience at my own wedding, in January. Less than 48 hours after Carla and I said “Si” dozens of great photos from our wedding were on FaceBook — thanks our guests. Wow!

These images might not be “wow!” in the pro wedding photographer sense of quality, but we think they are great — uniquely intimate and special. So we want them to be part of our album. I also want to make sure I can archive them with the files our pro photographer handed over.

When I had this Wedding Photography 2.0 experience (something conceptual and practically simply not possible a decade ago) it became clear to me that wedding photographers need to evolve services to best embrace the exciting developments in picture taking and picture sharing?

I have a simple idea for how they can do so, and I like that fact that it’s not reactionary, or defensive — as in: Photographers should be taking much better images to make the guests’ pictures look inadequate.

The fact is that many guest images are great (often because they are not polished) and so I think wedding photographers should honor those guest efforts and, most important, figure out how to use them in a way to enhance their own business and creative efforts.

To address the “competition” from wedding guests, I propose that wedding photographers should integrate wedding guests’ images into their wedding photography services.

Rethinking Wedding Photography In a 2.0 World

I assume that a number of wedding photographers must already be leveraging the snapshots taken by wedding guest. How could they not? But then again, I bet it’s a small percentage of pros. I could see how many wedding photographers would hate the idea. Maybe it would seem to cheapen their own services, or maybe they have simply not considered it, continuing to concentrate on making stellar images and providing stellar services with those images.

However, smartly using images made by guests is a win-win for photographers and clients.

When guests’ images become part of the official wedding coverage, clients will receive much more robust photographic coverage. Not using guests’ images would be like a news magazing depending on only one photographer staff photographer at a major international event, instead of pulling from the photographic riches offered up by a picture agency backed by scores of photographers.

When wedding photographers leverage the images made by guests not only do they greatly expand “their” coverage with little effort, but they also provide clients with an additional, invaluable service that greatly increases their value as an image maker and image deliverer.

For photographers, the practical effort would be mainly in the realm of smart workflow — orchestrating digital asset management from multiple sources.

I think the hardest part of working with the images made by wedding guests is not practical but rather the need for photographers to rethink (perhaps drastically) their role as wedding photographer.

Instead of “just” creating and delivering amazing images, wedding photographers will have to Continue reading “Wedding Photography 2.0 Success: Use Guests’ Snapshots!”

Tags: Adding Value to Wedding Photography, Business of Photography, Creative Business Strategies, Easy Ways to Expand Wedding Photography Services, FaceBook, Marketing Strategies, Rethinking the Business of Photography, Wedding Photography, Wedding Photography 2.0, Wedding Photography and New Media