Been Busy This Weekend

A Photographer Needs to Stay Busy Doing Pictures

Advertising is a big fat mystery to me. I’m not mesmerized by Facebook and Instagram the same way some people get either. I have to set a calendar date to post on those and even then mostly miss the reminders. I’m really not curious about what someone ate for lunch today. Plus, can everyone’s lives be that spotless and perfect? Mine isn’t. Just this morning a giant Ford F-250 almost smashed into my RAV4 on the ice at a round-about. How would I post that? It’s not perfectly nice. Someone mentioned I should hire a high school kid to manage the social media stuff. That could be a great idea. Just need to find a kid.

So to make some nice spending money I work at the Athletic Club pool on weekends right now and mostly just hang out in the heated office. It’s helping with my knee issue AND lets me work on the blog and wedding/portrait/landscape stuff for about 18 hours a week.

Side bar: Why does everyone NEED two or three towels? I don’t get it. I imagine if they had to bring their own, they would somehow manage with one towel.

Anyway, I get to work on my work while getting paid to work at the pool. So a win/win scenario all around.

Using My Time Wisely

While I hang out solo at the outdoor pool I write this blog and the one for my landscape photography website in the hopes my websites will slowly climb the SEO ladder and people will see my work and hire me for their wedding photography needs. That of course takes maybe forever because many of the other local wedding photographers in Bend are doing the same thing. So it’s like electronic warfare with one side coming up with a weapon and then the other side countering it with something newer and better.

How to get my work in front of potential wedding couples as cheaply as possible. Recently a guy contacted me to advertise and it looked really good. Maybe I’ll sign up next year for a month or two. The problem was he charges $4,000 per month! That’s slightly out of my league right now. So when the Wedding Wire people called me for the thousandth time, I said “Might as well see what deal they’re offering this month.” I’ve advertised with them in the past and so far this year most of the people who’ve contacted me have found me on their site.

So now I’m paying to get higher up on their site. Problem is when I used to advertise it was with another local photographer who I no longer work with and so have to clean the site from all the joint work.

When the sales lady called and we were chatting (they did have a Valentines Deal by the way) she said to have 20 pictures ready to go. So I went back through he Lightroom and looked through over 5,000 pictures to try and narrow it down to 20. Oh my God! That’s hard to do. Luckily the pictures I already love seem to always rise to the top of any mass search. I’m also blessed to have trusted photo friends who took time out from their busy lives to help narrow a few pictures down for me. It did take a lot of sacrificing pictures to get it down to 20. Because there’s new pictures in the mix wanting to kick the older pictures out.

Plus there’s the whole Real Weddings section to add entire weddings in the portfolio. A bunch of the weddings in there were shot with the other photographer and I need them gone. I have several new ones wanting space. I’m also doing the Black and White Only option and needed a Black and White wedding.

Back to working here at the Athletic Club and all my time to work on pictures. It’s not endless. Snow needs clearing, towels need rolling, and water needs testing, so I’ve had to cut the blog down a little this week and work on the advertising. The bonus, however, is I DO have that 20 final pictures to share. Looking at them, about half were shot with a longer lens and half with about the 28-35 mm range and I think 12 were shot with the Profoto. That’s about what the ratios are for entire weddings. I had to have some black and whites, some posed, some ceremony, some candids, some engagement portraits, some tight, some loose, and a good all around balance. Plus, most importantly I wanted to show high energy and almost make the view hear what it was sounding like when the picture was done. A tall order and I’ll let the viewer decide if my goals were achieved.

Enjoy!