How to Get Started in Wedding Photography: A Checklist
When thinking about how to get started with wedding photography, you’ll want to make a checklist of things you need to do, have, or create. Today I’ll give you a starting point as well as prompts to help you customize your list. The first thing you might notice is that it’s not all about photography.
However, getting started in wedding photography requires a few more things from putting up a website to figuring out how to do pricing. Below is a basic checklist. I’ll break it down further and discuss a few of the phases but depending on where you’re at with each of these you might need to break it down even more.
The Wedding Photography Checklist
Below is a wedding photography checklist that will help you identify where you stand when it comes to getting started. Some of these might come easier than others but you can quickly get started on any of them. See if there is one you can check off today.
- Portfolio
- Business name
- Logo
- Website
- Email address
- Budget
- Pricing
- Marketing plan
- Client tracking software
- Agreement
Did you check any off? Can you build a portfolio of a few images or come up with three potential business names? Is there one of these that you can work on today?
Let’s break down this checklist a little further and see if we can’t make it less intimidating too.
Building a Wedding Photography Portfolio
The first item on the checklist is a big one. It’s the actual work you’re setting out to do. In order to be a wedding photographer, you need to have some skill at taking wedding pictures, enough at least to convince someone to hire you.
The way to demonstrate your skill is to put together a portfolio of your work. If you’ve already started second shooting, you may already have some photos to build a portfolio from. If not, this one step is going to be something you need to break down and spend some more time on.
How can you build a portfolio? Well, you’ll need photos that demonstrate your skills and if you don’t have any, you’ll need to go shoot some. You might do some second shooting or have some friends model for you so that you can create some images.
Technically your first portfolio doesn’t have to even be wedding pictures, you just need something to show potential clients. We actually used a portfolio of landscape images to book our first wedding. The couple saw our work and trusted our photography skills enough to hire us and bam, our first wedding.
Eventually, you’ll fine-tune to perfect your portfolio. Every wedding you shoot will likely make your portfolio stronger. But you have to start somewhere so put together a portfolio of your best work as of yet and then plan to update it as you go.
Share Your Work: Website, Name, Logo, Email
Once you have a portfolio, you need to put that portfolio somewhere that people can see it. The most common place to host your portfolio is a website. You might want to have a business name and logo to go with your website as well as an email address so that people can contact you.
Just the act of putting up a website legitimizes you. Your website will morph over time and become more professional. You can always update your logo and change your business name, nothing is set in stone.
Eventually, you’ll want to put some thought into your business name. But for getting started with wedding photography it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Long term your portfolio will grow and so will your business. You might have a vision for the direction of your business and that vision might change. Putting thought behind each of these steps is a great process for being intentional, and at the same time, you can leave room for growth.
Do Business: Budget, Pricing, Marketing, Client Management, Agreement
The final phase of getting started with wedding photography is the business stuff. You need to create a budget so that you know your costs for doing business and can set pricing. Then you need a way to find clients, manage them, and have official things like an agreement.
Again, with all of these things, you’ll want to leave room for growth. Your pricing isn’t forever, it’s just for those first few jobs. Keep your overhead low in the beginning so that you can have realistic pricing knowing that eventually you’ll need to set profitable pricing for a sustainable business.
Client management software really helps you track leads and emails so that you don’t let opportunities fall through the cracks. Having an agreement will help you set expectations and protect yourself if it ever comes to that. And marketing, well marketing makes all the difference between finding clients and sitting at home twiddling your trigger fingers.
How to Get Started in Review
In review, it can be helpful to build a checklist of things you need in order to get started in wedding photography. I gave you a template at the beginning of this article and you may need to break it down further.
What steps do you plan to take to build your portfolio? What marketing strategies are most suited to your personality? And what tools, strategies, and processes will help make you more effective and efficient.
Hopefully this checklist helps you identify where you are in the process and what your current weaknesses are. Maybe you have a strong portfolio from years of second shooting but just need to build your own business. Or perhaps you’re unafraid to start the business but your portfolio is lacking the quality you need to find paying clients.
My suggestion, pick the easy tasks and check them off as fast as possible to build momentum. That will give you the confidence to tackle whichever step feels more challenging to you. Get started and then keep going, you got this!
