Balancing the Art and Business of Wedding Photography

Balancing the Art and Business of Wedding Photography is your guide to efficient and effective running of your wedding photography business.  Whether you're just getting started or want to improve your current approach, this reference guide will be an invaluable asset for making your business great.

Many people get excited at the prospect of wedding photography as a career. Why shouldn't they? It's exciting and fun. You get to meet and celebrate with hundreds of interesting people throughout the year, and you can get paid to do it. You get the pleasure of making art out of someone's love story. You can have a profound impact on a couple's happiness, just by capturing photographs of their wedding day. It is even possible to make a decent living at it if you have the right skills, opportunities, motivation, and persistence. Many eager would-be wedding photographers get excited and jump into the deep end, head-first, without a solid understanding of what is entailed in being a successful wedding photographer.

For every experienced and successful wedding photographer out there, you will likely find two or three dozen who did not last more than a year or two. Why? Few people can successfully balance art with business. Over the years I have spent as a full time professional wedding photographer, a significant number of people have asked me to host seminars or give private lessons on the business side of this exciting, challenging, and highly rewarding industry. There are innumerable books available on the techniques of wedding photography as an art form, but few which tell you what to do outside of the camera itself. Many artists are not adept at business. Balancing the Art and Business of Wedding Photography is my attempt to help those artists strike a balance between the performance of wedding photography as an art, and the production of wedding photography as a successful and efficient business.

Just some of the helpful information available in this book includes:

• Setting up your business legally and efficiently
• Creating online and print marketing strategies
• Choosing the right camera equipment
• Basic camera usage and techniques
• How to get leads and experience
• Creating an efficient workflow for bookings
• Creating questionnaires to gather information from your clients
• Preparing your shot list and gear
• Navigating a wedding day from start to finish
• Post-processing workflow and editing
• Posing techniques and using tricks to work with various physical traits
• Going above and beyond helping your couple and guests
• Ceremony structures and etiquette for many wedding types

Michael Chadwick is a full time wedding photographer and inductee in The Knot's 'Best of Weddings Hall of Fame'. He has photographed hundreds of weddings around the world, and has won award after award from industry leading wedding sites such as The Knot and Wedding Wire. Michael Chadwick has photographed hundreds of weddings on multiple continents. His humorous and fun approach to weddings, combined with his attention to the smallest of details, all make him a highly sought-after wedding photographer. Couples have raved about his ability to be everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time, remaining unobtrusive but capturing every moment. They have jokingly called him such names as the "Bride Whisperer," the "Wedding Swiss Army Knife," and "Hey you, tall person."

Michael's wedding photographs have been published in many industry online and print magazines. Michael grew up in The Woodlands, Texas but moved to New Jersey to attend Westminster Choir College as a Music Education major. He moved back to Texas for eight years after college, but returned to the northeast in 2007 and has resided in both Manhattan's Upper West Side and his current home in Medford, New Jersey. Michael is also an opera singer and stage director. His company Chadwick Creative Arts, LLC includes his photography studio as well as his opera supertitle rental business, and a Victorian style caroling group he sings in and co-manages with his wife Suzanne.