Atlanta brides, the time is almost near for the Supertastic Inspired Bride event at StudioWed Atlanta. Come meet us and some of Atlanta’s finest vendors on Sunday September 12. We’re very excited about this show and looking forward to seeing you!
Category Archives: News
Just two short years ago, we sent a very happy child off to 1K preschool. 4 hrs a day was great for her and us! It’s hard to believe that she just started 3K this week. Where has the time gone? The fact that she is going to seem so grown when we bring the twins home soon is even harder. There will never be another like her for sure. She is her own person and she is very good at it!
Here is the first day of 1K in 2008
and here is her first day this week….
We would like to take this opportunity to formally announce that we are teaming up with StudioWed/Atlanta to promote our services and style of photography in the great city of Atlanta, GA. We have always been really big fans of the Atlanta area, and we feel that the time is right for a transition to a much larger market that is overflowing with talent in the wedding industry. We first met wedding & event planner Michelle Gainey at the Jan 2009, Southern Weddings Magazine launch party in Atlanta. Shortly thereafter she launched StudioWed, and we were extremely impressed with her operation and business sense. We knew deep down that if we ever decided to embrace the idea of diversifying our business into Atlanta, she was going to be the person we went to first. The stars aligned once again recently, and we are now proud to be the newest faces on her elite team of wedding vendors. Atlanta is a 5 hour drive for us, but we are proud to now call it our second home, especially with our beautiful new meeting space in metro-west Atlanta. We will be there quite often for industry events, as well as to meet clients inquiring about our services. If you’re in the Atlanta area, please join us for our first StudioWed appearance on September 12,2010. We will have a lot more details on this new adventure as well as info on more events we’ll be attending soon. Come say hi!
Details below:
One of the hardest things to blog for us is anything that might be construed as bragging. With that being said, Wesley entered the Emerge photo competition for wedding photographers recently in May. This was an international competition created to bring up and coming mostly unnoticed talent into the spotlight to be recognized in the international wedding industry. It was sponsored and judged by some of the leading wedding industry professionals such as Rebecca Crumley from The Knot Magazine, and world-renowned wedding photographer Joe Buissink. There were 5 categories to enter, and 3 winners were chosen from each category for a total of 15 winners out of well over 1000 entries. We were quite honored and shocked to get the notification that Wesley had finished 2nd place in the “details” category with 10 images he took at Ginny & Brad’s Carillon wedding in January of 2010. He won some great new photography toys and equipment, as well as being profiled in the international photography magazine “Rangefinder” in an upcoming issue. We are very proud of him! We are also thankful to Carillon Weddings and Christina at Nouveau for providing those amazing details!
This post has been a long time coming as I’ve been thinking for a while about exactly how I wanted to word this to not sound insensitive. We were at a bridal event recently, and before it started, one of the vendors handed us a weight loss business card (hidden message? maybe) and inquired about our pricing. Nothing unusual, but on a trip to the bathroom Rae overheard this particular vendor talking trash specifically about us in the hallway. “We must really like ourselves charging those prices” I think was the topic of the conversation. There were a couple of other photographers mentioned by name as well. Now, most would have been offended, but we just chuckled it off.
Where am I going with this? Here’s the deal:
Your wedding photo portfolio is probably the most extensive set of photographs you will ever have in your life. We’re talking 800-1000 images of you and your family & friends. We’re talking about you and your significant other spending lots of money, getting all dressed up in that beautiful white dress, makeup, hair, flowers, his suit, etc. There is a lot of time and effort put into most weddings. If you go to all that trouble to look your best, don’t you want it to show in your photographs? Do you want photos so badly overexposed and enhanced that you lose all of the detail in that beautiful dress? Ever had a photographer with little wedding experience who yells at the guests or breaks their one and only camera at your wedding? Stay with me here…..
Wedding photography is like a steak. There are a lot of steaks out there waiting to be purchased. Now, you can go to Denny’s and get a steak with sides for $7.99, or you can go to Ruth’s Chris for $129. With Denny’s I know what I’m going to get. It may look good on the outside, but the steak is probably going to be hard to swallow once it’s delivered to me. It’s possibly going to come with customer service that’s less than stellar as well. However, since I can’t afford $129 meals all the time, I know that on special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries , I’m going to spend the extra $$ and know that it will be the best steak I may get that year. I also know that when I walk in the door at Ruth’s Chris, they are going to take care of me, hold my hand, make sure my wine glass stays full. It’s a whole different experience than Denny’s.
Shouldn’t your wedding be a special occasion? If you only had a chance to eat one steak your entire life, are you going to eat at Denny’s, or are you going to eat at Ruth’s Chris? Shouldn’t the most extensive photography portfolio you’ll ever own and pass down for generations be the same way? Now before I make people mad, there are photographers who charge less than us who are very good and can deliver on customer service. I am proud to know some of them. But, (BIG but), this is where experience comes into play. Your prices should reflect your experience, your expertise, your reputation. We don’t charge what we do because we woke up and decided that’s what it was going to be one day. We charge what we do because we’ve earned it. We can back up our talk and walk the walk. Those who charge half or even 65% of our prices do not do what we do and how we do it.
When we were shopping for a new Honda recently, I didn’t go to the BMW dealerships and ridicule them for selling $70,000 cars I couldn’t afford. If they can get that much for a car, that’s great for them! They have built a client base of loyal customers who appreciate what it’s like to drive a BMW and are willing to spend the extra money. I can’t afford one, but that’s okay. We all have our priorities. We try to find a happy medium for everyone to enjoy our work while running a profitable business. It’s that simple. Now, do you want a steak that’s hard to chew once you get it, or do you want to spend a little more for your one and only steak dinner?