A career as a wedding photographer can be both lucrative and rewarding but in these recession hit days it can be a hard business to get into
. The professional wedding photographer is competing with the part-time amateur who may have the latest digital equipment and feels that through contacts and acquaintances having a new part-time job can be quite appealing. It's not hard now for anyone to set up an attractive looking website with decent looking photographs and try to convince potential couples to sign up for their services.
So careful planning is required. A wedding day will be one of the most important days in a couple's life so you need to get things right. There can be no redo. As a wedding photographer you will have a very responsible job. But with the right preparation you can be in business.
Qualifications for the Wedding Photography can be obtained through a further or higher education course resulting in a City & Guilds certificate or BTEC. Whilst qualifications can be useful to get a foothold in the business, experience is much more important.
One way of gaining experience is to work as an assistant photographer. Some of the bigger studios employ photographic assistants to which you could apply or you could offer your services on a freelance basis. This will help develop your photography skills and give you an insight as to how the business works. Basically, the assistant photographer helps to ensure that a shoot goes according to plan. This may involve practical tasks such as setting up the lighting, taking meter readings or transporting the equipment to the site.
After getting the practical experience you may want to set up your own business. As a wedding photographer you will be running a small business and with most small businesses nothing comes naturally. It may be useful to take a small business course and this will help with accounts and marketing. A business plan may be useful and most business courses will teach how to do this.
As a professional wedding photographer quality is much more important than quantity. If you deliver quality work to your clients then referrals through word of mouth will come easily. You will need to keep up to date with the latest photographic technology, trends and imaging software and with access to the internet it will be a continuous learning process.