Great Letter

Dear Gary,

Morning, responding to your entry on Xanga about 'spraying and praying' and amateur photographers claiming themselves to be 'professional' photographers. Last July I was hired by a remove family member (Uncles ex wife) to shoot her registery office wedding. On the day I was nervous, I was more scared than anything of mucking the whole wedding up by producing less than acceptable photos, I charged her £150.00/$237.47 Canadian Dollars because I didn't want to be out of my depth and be in such a position where I was unable to repay her the money if she demanded a refund. 

Every time I look back at the photos I took, I am ashamed, I'm distraught that I'd let myself down and let her down. Although upon handing he images over she said she was overwhelmed, I still felt somewhat bad for charging her for a in totally honesty, and please do excuse my language but a shit job!

I've never once claimed to be a professional photographer, in fact at times when possible clients have approached me looking for a professional photographer, I always point them in the direction of one of my associates who are to me, professional photographers. 

I respect you as a photographer and businessman and I your debates always interest me which one reason I'm writing this mail. You mentioned something yesterday or a few days ago saying that conventions or something similar should have staged wedding sets for which photographers could take photos of the set to use on template sites or something along those lines. I believe that would be a superb idea and follow that through with staged weddings with actors to teach up-coming photographers wedding photography techniques. 

To show how ashamed of my work I am, I'll share a link and please, if you feel the need to use it as an example to show other photographers the mistakes amateur photographers make.

Benjamin.

Here is the link to his gallery.  Honestly, it was nowhere as terrible as he was making it sound, but he does have a point.

Learn To Burn

A wedding is no place to learn how to shoot weddings.

The phrase "Spray and Pray" is causing an uproar because it is simply irresponsible for a person who is not familiar with wedding photography to advertise that they shoot weddings.  It is dishonest and it causes problems.  

Jessica Claire and Jenn Bebb shot our wedding.  The images are spectacular and it's how I remember the day.  Talk about girls who knew what they were doing!  It was so captivating watching their lens selections, cool and confident manner of dealing with the never-ending surprises and readjustments to shooting a wedding.  They are professionals through and through.

Today there are a lot of fake professionals.  That's what has everybody up in arms.  False photographers who don't know how to handle a crush situation.  Who don't know which lens to use, or how to correct for heavy backlighting or other problems when shooting something that can't be done over.

I had somebody who had only shot a few weddings say that the reason she charged only $500 was because, "If things don't turn out, at least I didn't charge a lot".  I looked at her impressive template website, and I could see how an unsuspecting couple could hang their trust on the perception of professionally.  It says "internationally published".  It says, "Available for International Travel".  If you don't know the difference, you'd think that she was the real deal.

So wedding couples are getting burned.  And the newbies who shoot these disaster weddings (at any fee) wind up quitting because they can't deal with getting screamed at.  I know of MANY people who came into this, blew a job and quit right after.  They leave a wake of their disaster behind them, as word spreads that the couple's wedding photographer "sucked".  

How many times have we heard, "I hated my wedding photographer".  Would YOU like to be the recipient of such anguish?  Would you like to have to field the calls and feel the outrage of somebody whose day you've ruined because you believed that "now is the time" and you're just going to have faith in yourself and "go for it".  All you need is a fancy website and a community of people who will encourage you to "do it" and boost you up.  Much like what goes on at Weight Watchers or at AA meetings.  

Wedding Photography is probably one of the most important responsibilities any service professional can have.  When it comes out bad, its' heartbreaking.  So to create a "slick" website professing to be a professional photographer when you are not experienced is dishonest.  

Doing social media and hype and campaigns to get people to "like" your photography fan page on Facebook or Twitter is dishonest if you really don't know how to shoot.  PDN or some other magazine named [b] as one of the top photographers in the world, scoring above Annie Leibowitz!  He was one of the first to jump on blogging and tweeting, and got a ton of followers to rise him up the pedestal.  What that did was bring down PDN's reputation, and even the people on that list don't really publicize their ranking on it because it was so badly ridiculed.

Me and DJ have been back and forth on voicemails.  We're having lunch next week as he and I are friends, but we have vastly differing views on certain things.  I can respect him because he's built this loyal group of followers that believe everything he says, and is that not admirable?  He is getting rich off of these people because he was able to say the right things, do the right things to get them to believe that his advice is really great.

That's where I come from.  The advice isn't really great.  DJ doesn't (or shouldn't) care about his standing as a professional photographer - he left that a long time ago to go beyond that and teach people how to be "winners" in photography.  I don't think he ever really took his shooting skills that seriously.  In all of our long talks, he never talked like my photographer friends about photography.  We shared discussions about SEO, e-commerce, touring to promote a product.  I don't ever think we actually had a discussion about photography.  For DJ, photography itself was a stepping stone to a more profitable path - and that's subscription plans.  For that, honestly - he hit it out of the ballpark.

Dane Sanders tried it and was gone about as fast as he arrived.  Becker's [b] school was an attempt at the same thing (getting rich off of monthly subscriptions) and that one fizzled a long time ago.  But DJ did it.  He's getting rich off of his followers and that was his goal absolutely for sure.  My theory as to why he got traction where Dane and Becker sank?  The tie to Christianity - that's my guess and I think it's right.  I'm not saying this is wrong, he is not alone.  And if he didn't do it, the crowd would select another leader.

The Importance Of An Organized Checklist...

There is a lot of discussion about how to photograph responsibly lately.  But file management is also extremely important.  I relied very heavily on this sheet above for keeping my cameras and files organized.  I also, by labeling my cards, was able to keep the photos taken by my second shooter identified and separate, important if there is a dispute over who took that award winning image.

Lastly, the sheet above can really protect you if you get sued over lost images.  A judge will understand that mistakes happen, and that with such diligent record keeping of your image files, it will show that you are anything but negligent.

Two Styles Of Shooting

This "Spray and Pray" is one of the loudest thumping of war drums I've ever heard yet.  It's an idea that one of the top ten tips to being a wedding photographer is to set your camera on "Program" mode, shoot a lot and hope something comes out of it.

Here is a fantastic opening for the true professional photographer to really increase the professional divide.  Here is how to educate what a real photographer does in capturing a moment, on the fly, making rapid decisions while catching the moment.

On the left is an image I took at a wedding I shot as a guest for our longtime assistant, Lauren.  On the right is an image David Jay shot at Stacy B. Shy's wedding.  David Jay is the photographic guru promoting the "Spray and Pray" method.  David was named one of the top ten photographers in the world by PDN Magazine.

My image is on the left, DJ's is on the right.           His was shot RAW, mine was shot JPG.  

Here are the steps to get an unposed image like I did on the left.  The image on left was resized, but otherwise STRAIGHT FROM THE CAMERA and not modified in any way.

1) Choose your lens - During sunset, I knew that I would get some beautiful photos of the guests in the elegant lighting.  It wouldn't make sense to shoot that with a wide angle lens, because I'd just get a big room with a lot of shadows cutting across.  So I selected a long, fast telephoto lens for this series.

2) Move your feet so you are at the perfect angle - I had to select the guests that were perfectly lit at the angle that would look more striking.  If I moved to the right, the shot would be backlit, with the skin tones going murky, just like the "Spray and Pray" example above.  If I move to the left, I'd get people turning away from the sunset to avoid squinting.  So I hovered from left to right until I had people perfectly rim-lit.

2) Wait for the moment the lighting was perfect on this bridesmaid.  Her hand touching her shoulder looked very elegant.  Once I locked my focus sensor on her eyeball and tickled my aperture wheel until it was wide open, I waited for this expression.  It was gone in a fleeting second, and nailing moments keeps you sharp.  It keeps your eyes OPEN, while "Spray and Pray" can actually be done with automated cameras with eyes closed.

3) Lock Focus and Exposure - Program selects the focus point for you.  Even if your camera has face detection, it doesn't have eyeball detection.  So to be safe, the camera will increase depth of field by shutting aperture down, but you'd lose that beautifully soft, selective focus look.  I locked my focus point in the settings to the centre spot, then focused on her eyeball and the used focus lock to freeze the lens from whirring.  Having set the camera to Focus Lock = Exposure Lock, I was now ready for her expression to soften and then grab that shot.

4) Open your radar to anticipate the moment - professional photojournalists have what I call a "radar".  Since the time between you seeing an obstacle and stepping on your brake at 60mph is 180 feet (pedestrian is dead before you think to hit the brakes), similarly a wedding is going at 175 miles per hour.  You have to know when the peak moment is going to happen and click the shutter in anticipation of the moment.  By the time you "see" the moment, if you react with your trigger finger, you'll miss it.  That's the huge difference between a fantastic photographer and the average one.  The ability to squeeze the trigger when you feel the smile start to break.

I've always suggested to my friends (and formerly my clients) to ask any photographer they are interviewing to see one wedding from start to finish.  This will speak volumes about what you will expect.

I've put the online galleries from Stacy B. Shy from her wedding from my buddy the "Spray and Pray" lecturer, (who charged $6,000) and me shooting my friend's wedding well as a guest.

Click on each thumbnail to expand:

DJ's 

mine

The "Spray And Pray" Controversy

There is such a crazy uproar right now over David Jay's newest promotion, "The Photo System" - ten tips to help you become successful in wedding photography. It has created a ton of ridicule and divided people greatly.  Yet it is really clever marketing.

If you've seen DJ speak before, he explains that getting people to talk is great for business.  During the short time he was shooting weddings, he would do a slide show at the reception of the photographs he did earlier in the day, and that was great for buzz.  Guests would clamor for his card, and it was amazing advertising at a really prime target market: the friends and families of the couple you are photographing.  

I myself never did the slide show thing because I was too busy focusing on trying to catch as many memorable moments as possible, and the wedding flies by so fast I didn't want to miss a beat.  I also knew that referrals would come for years and years from a satisfied couple, not just right after the reception.

If you run a business like a businessperson, you rely on numbers as your leading indicators.  Like a captain of a ship, you read the gauges to monitor the status and trends of things that you can control.  And in this new world of viral marketing - we watch page views and time spent on your page as a hugely important metric.  It's the best advertising you can get is to get people to visit your site and talk about you.  

On DJ's Facebook page, he quotes remarkable statistics in a short amount of time to his new website.  Hundreds of thousands of views with people spending a long amount of "sticky" time viewing the page.  In-between the seemingly outrageous advice he gives are cleverly placed ads for his business.  This has tangible monetary value that you otherwise would have to pay a fortune for.  For example, if you email blast 100,000 people, you're doing pretty freaking great if 20% open it.  If there's a link inside the email campaign, congrats if 10% click through.  You are down to maybe 200 people seeing your message.  And marketing services like Campaigner would charge you about $500 to manage that mailing.  So 200 people can see your announcement.

Now think of the return of putting something controversial on your site.  At first a few hundred people see it maybe in the first hour.  If it's boring, they move their attention to something else.  But if you put something really bold then it goes viral.  And that's the goal.   If you put up a video on YouTube of your son scoring a goal at the soccer game, you'd have a number of page views from yourself and maybe other family members who see your email about it.  But if you cut your penis off with a steak knife and eat it on a YouTube video, you'd have millions of people in a remarkable instant seeing it.

How does this phenomenon work?  Say 100 people see your controversial ad in the first hour.  If they're super pissed about it, or think it's the most ridiculous thing they'd ever seen, then they tweet about it.  Say that each of those 100 people have 500 twitter followers.  Boom.  Now you have 50,000 people hating it or praising it.  Those 50,000 people have 100 twitter followers?  Now you're at 5 MILLION people seeing your content.

Do you get it?  This is business and it works!  All chatter is better than no chatter, and it goes viral and viral and viral.

This is where "Spray and Pray" come in.  It's bold - and it directly edifies the new crowd of novice photographers who are all whipped up with inspirational messages that the "yes - you can do it... go for it.." presenters are selling.  You can have the "Fast Track" success that is now eluding all of the established professional photographers who are "grumpy". ("grumpy" is a term introduced by Dane Sanders to describe established photographers who rightfully are critical of the new crowd who are big on SEO and social networking, but do not have the skills to maintain a standard in the business of photography, as is the case with Dane himself).

I had just heard this story about a new photographer who got a cherry job of flying to a location to meet an international client for his surprise engagement to his girl.  He hired this photographer to document the surprise.  Since this was such a huge commission, the photographer went to a friend of mine's workshop in Vegas and heard over and over again the phrase, "I shoot in Manual Mode with the lens wide open".  Hearing what she wanted to hear, she flew to the assignment, clicked the big, gnurled rubber knob to the left two clicks from "P" to "M" and shot the assignment... ignoring the completely white rectangles in her LCD screen as camera malfunction.  When she got to her computer to review the files, they were more than five stops overexposed and the entire shoot was ruined.  Of course the girl panicked, and of course she would have been better off sticking to "Program" mode, a mode that she had relied on for years.  She was unfamiliar with M requiring you to monitor the shutter speed and aperture at the same time, all she knew was "M" had better results.  Amazingly, I can understand how she would think this.

If you gave me a sophisticated professional video camera, I would never think to shoot it on Manual unless it was something slow motion where I wanted to capture more than 30fps.  In fact, I have this little camcorder and I've never thought about the possibility of shooting it in M mode.  So I can see how this new photographer would have no concept of what "M" really means.  Maybe that's why DJ put in his thing to put the camera on "P" and "Spray and Pray".  But I think it's more clever than that.

I think it's about getting traffic.  And if this is the strategy, then you know what?  It works.  I knew DJ from the start.  Now he has a fancy house in Santa Barbara with a panoramic ocean view.  He built this himself.  He's a self-made guy.  He, through his skill in social networking actually got himself named as one of the top ten photographers IN THE WORLD by PDN Magazine back around 2006, when he shot the following wedding of Stacey B. Shy:

Stacey was furious by the photography DJ did of her wedding back in 2006, but she was hesitant to say much about it because her maid of honor worked for DJ at the time.  Stacey became a professional photographer herself, and pretty much kept silent until she saw, what she perceived, as an attack at the credibility of her hard-earned professional skills by the "Spray and Pray" promotion.  So she posted her wedding images, shot by DJ, by then one of the most revered, famous photographers in the world, lecturing internationally as a high-end, published photographer who charged this couple $6,000 and gave them a few DVD's.  Here's some of the images below, and at all 350 of them can be seen on her Picasa Gallery:

There is an old saying, "if you form a line, people will come and stand in it".  The wedding photography industry at the time WANTED DJ to be a great photographer.  They called him great, and he was one of the first that I can recall that used Jesus in his marketing and communication campaigns and tied Christianity with the prosperity of his business and life.  So you had this Christian crowd wanting to rally behind a new leader, and they made DJ a leader, and he benefited financially from this - getting the titles and the accolades that would turn him into a high-end shooter.  DJ knew at the time that he wasn't really a photographer, but a line formed in front of his door and just like the example that I discussed in detail yesterday - when the spotlight shines on you, why not monetize it if you are a businessperson?  Well, there are a zillion reasons why (like credibility, avoiding embarassment, etc) but ok - how can one resist not cashing in on the spotlight?  Look at Sarah Palin, and you'll see why DJ also became a leader/authority on professional photography.  If it wasn't DJ, it would've been Dane (but no that didn't work out very well at all) so then it would be Jasmine, and DJ discovered Jasmine to his great profitability.

DJ is a businessman.  This is where this is.  You can see by the promo that his ads are smack embedded right there in the "free" advice.  It's like he was able to instantly cut himself a check for - say - $50,000 in free advertising.  If you could get $50,000 just by clicking a "publish" button on your website, could you really say no?

Professional Photographers, I don't know if I'd freak out about this.  He makes it clear that his tips for "not bringing a lot of fancy equipment" to your first wedding is really meant for couples who weren't going to hire a professional anyway.  So will this impact your market?  I don't know.  I don't know if those people would've come to you anyway.  Not sure yet, but we'll find out pretty soon if your bookings start to drop.

DJ has a ton of power in this industry.  He understands how to form a crowd, how to get the crowd (the community he formed) to go nuts in following and praising him and Jesus at the same time, and to my knowledge, he's the first to be able to do that.  Not my style, but he lives in a nicer house than all of his followers who are giving him their credit card numbers so he can charge them every month.  It's really - brilliant!