[JBrunner]

With everyone getting out of wedding photography, looks like it might be a pretty good time to get in!

Not really. I'm sure for every quality photographer that calls it quits, there are thousands of college kids with DSLRs that will do it for $100 and spend 13 hours 'shopping out Uncle Ted.


I'm curious as to what practices these are.

I think the most powerful one I use is called "pre-qualifying" as in I'm turning down almost as much work as I take. They don't realize it at the time, but while they are checking me out, I'm doing the same to them. Certain signals result in me referring them to someone else. It is a very powerful tool for having mostly positive experiences.

The second trick is not to get involved in albums. I farm that over to someone who likes doing it. I can easily make up the revenue shooting more gigs, because I can take more as I'm not bogged down for a month or more handling the maddening trickle of minutia that producing albums entails.

As far as the people who would hire a $100 DSLR kid, well, they aren't anywhere near my customer demographic, so they might as well not exist from my perspective.