Author: David

WPPI – Wedding and Portrait Photographers International – host a giant convention and trade show every year, and this year I attended. I was looking to absorb as much information as possible on the business side of things, as well as make contacts, be inspired and get to ogle gear at the trade show.

Here are the key things I came home with:

1) 15,000 is a lot of photographers

Sometimes it can seem like you’re ploughing quite a lonely furrow when you’re a photographer, so it was nice to feel like I actually have a tribe. And a large one at that – around 15,000 of us all in the one place. It meant the queues could be long, but the pre-board system worked well, and I was never turned away from any of the non-preboarded classes I turned up for.

2) You need to love the business side of things

If you’re doing this as a living, then you have to love doing all the other stuff besides shooting that goes along with running a business. I chose a lot of business and marketing-oriented classes because I want to able to keep doing this job for the long term, and unless I keep clients coming in and making a profit by making them happy, I won’t be able to keep the doors open very long.

So unless you look forward to calculating your overheads and your cost of goods sold and working on a marketing plan and remembering to renew your insurance, then you’ll be miserable as a pro shooter. But if you want to embrace all that stuff, then climb aboard.

I’d already been running my own web design business for six years, so I knew this going in, but it’s worth bearing in mind that you won’t be shooting gorgeous kids all day.

3) Other people’s weddings and family images can make me cry

Most of the speakers showed some of their work, regardless of the topic they were talking about – we’re photographers, after all, so show us some images. I think it’s a sign that I’m in the right job that some of these slideshow made me tear up – photos of random strangers getting married, or families I’ll never meet.

These images tell the story of the most important things in our lives – our family and what they mean to us. It sounds really corny, but what we do when we photograph these things really does matter. So I’m not ashamed I got a bit emotional over it.

4) The Trade show was surprisingly resistable, except for the gorgeous books and albums

I thought it’d be risky to let me loose on the floor of the giant trade show, but actually I didn’t spend too much time there.

The Sigma guys were friendly but didn’t make me change my opinion of their reliability after my recent bad experience with their 24-70 f/2.8. I told them about it and they shrugged – “Sometimes it’s the camera, you know?”
“Even if every other lens you’ve ever tried is fine with it?”
“Yep. We can calibrate the lens to work with that camera, though.”
“But then you can’t use that lens with any other body, right?”
“Right.” The guy didn’t seem too bothered with this unsatisfactory state of affairs.

I’m not slagging Sigma for being rubbish – in fact, what’s frustrating is that I’ve heard great things about some of their lenses and would like to try them – I’m slagging them because it seems you can never be sure if any particular copy of their lenses will work with your particular camera. And they know that.

The one sort of thing that did have be salivating at the trade show, however, were the albums and books. Here was a great chance for me to actually handle the merchandise. The albums and books I loved the most were the simplest and most upscale. The Asukabook coffee table style bound books were lovely, as were those from Iris Book.

I’m not a fan of the super thick pages, glossy lay-flat flush mount style that seemed much in evidence, but the books of matted prints from finao (acutally made by Seldex) were also beautiful. To me, presenting the images from a shoot in a beautiful book makes so much sense – it frees the digital files from just sitting on a hard drive or disk somewhere, and creates an object that tells the story of that family and child at that particular moment in time. Love it.

6) If we’re not thinking about video now, we should be

David McLain gave an excellent talk about how he incorporates video into the stills work he does. It looked refreshingly straightforward, and didn’t require tons of extra gear and lighting (“I’m allergic to that stuff, man,” was David’s comment).

Thinking of ways to capture small snippets of video at the same time as you’re shooting the stills (with the same camera of course, which means the same control over depth of field) makes a lot of sense.

Conclusion

I’m still sorting through all my notes, but I had a great (if tiring) time, and have a lots of new stuff to work on as a result of all I learned. I’ll definitely go again, and when I do I’m bringing the largest business cards I can find. I threw my card into the bag with all the other photogs in pretty much each of classes, and didn’t win a single thing.

Las Vegas is loud. Super loud. As soon as you get off the plane there’s neon and slots in the airport concourse.

Then you arrive at your hotel (in my case the monstrously large MGM Grand), and you see the full range of first-world humanity walking through the casinos, and it’s not a pretty sight. Brides in their dresses walk past frat boys carrying drinks the size of hockey sitcks, toddlers run by Asian couples dressed to the nines, and an old man smoking a pipe wanders past a guy in shorts and wife beater.

I’m one of the folks with the lanyards round their neck – conference attendees. I’m at the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International conference until Wednesday.

It’s the end of Day 1 and I’m knackered – party from an early start to fly in this morning. Both the talks I’ve attended so far were good, in different ways. The first by Jared Platt and the second by Jason Aten.

First up was smart, thoughtful and acerbic Jared Platt. His talk, called ‘The Photographer’s Eye’ was more conceptual and less immediately practical than many here (I’m guessing – his was my first one ever), as he stressed that we won’t get hired for our technical ability, but for our eye and instinct. Here’s a quick overview (he’ll forgive me if I’ve garbled what he was saying).

He outlined five elements to consider that will help you distinguish your work from others – including Uncle Bob with his new DSLR (which is capable of doing 90% of what yours can do).

1) The Thing Itself (here we have an advantage as portrait and wedding photographers, because our clients already love what we’re shooting). But Platt argued, the best thing we can do is make sure the images are about our subjects not about us being too precious.

That said, how we handle the other elements will determine whether anyone else responds to our images:

2) How we see the subject – our vantage point: creating depth and energy, making best use of the light, make sure this image is clear: all these depend on our vantage point.

3) How we frame the subject – here’s where we lie the most, argues Platt. But inclusion or omission, we make the world of the image what we want it to be. Busy, lonely, calm or unsettling – much of this is done with framing. Peace comes from leaving room in the frame for the subject to breathe, energy and dissonance from cropping tight (especially to the point of leaving bits of people out of the frame entirely.

4) What details we show – as details suggest the story.

We can’t every really know from only looking at an image what happened – and our clients already know the story. But it really helps to tell your version of the story while you’re showing them the images, to show why this image matters and remind them of the feeling behind it. And Platt made a good point when he pointed out that photographers’ blogs are an excellent way of letting other people know the story of a particular shot – by including the image and some text explanation it brings out the narrative that the image by itself is incapable of telling.

5) When we shoot it – the exact moment we choose to shoot is the final piece. He gave a couple of nice examples of waiting for passers-by to enter his shot to make it exactly what he wanted.

He finished by stressing that photography is about curiousity and seeing the world in our own way. That’s why we get hired, and why our photographs look different to everyone else’s.

I’ll blog on Jason’s much more practical but very useful talk later. Right now my brain’s about to turn to mush. More tomorrow.