Starting a wedding photography business is something that i got into about four years ago. As the story goes: one of best friends that was living with me at the time, was leaving to go somewhere with his camera. I asked him “where are you going?” he replied with: “going to shoot a wedding”. I asked him how much he gets paid to do that and he said “about $2,000”. I was just totally impressed with the fact that you can get paid about two thousand dollars to go to a wedding and take pictures. I mean come on, a wedding is pretty much a big party. A party that people pay sometimes over 30k to put on.

Now I was interested in getting paid that much money to shoot the wedding pictures, that meant that i need to learn how to start a wedding photography business. So that started my wedding photography career. At first I had no idea about anything camera related. I had no clue what aperture was or shutter speed. So what did I do? I emailed a bunch of wedding photographers in my area and asked them if I could be an unpaid assistant. In turn they would train me and “show me the ropes” of the wedding photography world. My Mentor is a very experienced wedding photographer that does 20-40 weddings per year by himself, and has been doing it for over 15 years. By working with him i quickly got the hang out it and the basic work-flow down. That was the key, learning how to take all of the weddings days events in stride.

Starting a wedding photography business is something that many people can do. I would say that the hardest thing about the business is actually signing up new brides. Marketing youreslf and your services is probably the hardest thing to get down. This is hard for some photographers because they are wedding photographers not sales people. And you kinda need to be a sales person in order to sign new clients. After you sign the new brides you have the hardest part of starting a wedding photography business down. I would say that after signing new clients mastering the formal shots would likely be the 2nd hardest thing about mastering wedding photos. This is because most of the photographs that you will take are candid, and don’t require the photographer to interact much at all with anyone at the wedding or the bridal party, you pretty much take pictures of whats happening; the “fly on the wall” act. With formal wedding pictures you need to directly interact with the bridal party after the ceremony.

This is one of the hardest parts about starting a wedding photography business because everyone just wants to get to the reception and party and you have to compose everyone and take great pictures. Shy people have a real problem here. They usually speak softly and cant get everyone attention and make the shots happen fast and get the bridal parties attention. If you can master formal wedding shots and signing new clients you are 90% the way there to being great in your wedding photography business.  Anyone that is interested in getting into the wedding business this is how i suggest doing it, no expensive schooling required.