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.
At first glance I thought this guest snap was a "delete." Then I realized it had great energy tht would be perfect for the dance sequence in a multimedia piece The only thing is. . .
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.
. . .because I didn't plan well, this image is in a MAJOR mess of folders with thousands of images I have to sort out. Plan ahead!
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.
August 31st, 2011 3:59 am
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