What do you do if you want to become a sought-after wedding photographer and build a successful profession?

Master Your Craft: Hone your photography skills relentlessly. Network: Connect with other professionals and potential clients. Showcase Your Work: Create an impressive portfolio. Deliver Exceptional Service: Provide outstanding client experiences. Market Strategically: Promote your services effectively.

Don't wait for clients to book you to go out and photograph work for your portfolio. Styled shoots and editorials are a viable option to showcase your work, style, and ability. Sometimes you need to create the opportunities to build your ideal portfolio of curated images, with attracting your dream clients in mind. The goal of styled shoots/editorials should always be content creation primarily, understanding that publication is more and more complicated.

Crafting a diverse portfolio as a wedding photographer involves curating a collection of images that exemplify your unique style, creativity, and ability to capture genuine emotions and moments. Showcase a variety of weddings, including different venues, cultural backgrounds, and styles, to demonstrate your versatility and adaptability. Emphasize your storytelling abilities by selecting images that evoke emotion and convey the essence of each wedding day. From candid moments to carefully composed portraits, highlight your technical proficiency and artistic vision while ensuring consistency in quality throughout your portfolio. By presenting a compelling showcase of your best work, you'll attract potential clients.

Ensure that your portfolio shows that you can capture a wedding day from start to finish. That means that you need to seek out opportunities to practice and have portfolio worthy images from parts of the day with less ideal conditions. Anyone can take a good picture during golden hour. You need to ensure you can take great pictures in harsh might, mixed light, dappled light, low light etc.....seek out chances to photograph getting ready times, receptions, etc. Ensure that you are confident and have the portfolio to prove it before you set out to offer services to clients. Otherwise, be upfront about where you are still building your skills and experiences when offering to photograph them.

The key to networking in the wedding industry is doing so authentically and respectfully. Don't be wasteful of others' time, or expect everyone to make themselves available for a "coffee date". Start with likeminded wedding vendors that fit your niche and have similar client demographics.

Find gaps in existing businesses. There’s always an open area for you to market to, depending on price point, services, timelines.

Treat your business like one and act professional. This sounds simple, but running your business like a hobby and not appearing as a polished and legitimate professional will hold you back. Having a Facebook page as your only website, an unbranded domain address through your website platform, or even a [email protected] address is going to set the wrong impression. Consider investing in the tools and software sooner rather than later that can show your professionalism and help you on board new clients simply and smoothly, such as CRMs like Dubsado.

There is a L O T of pressure online to be "full time" otherwise you're not considered a professional. What about the many, many people who are completely content doing this say as a part time thing?