For those of you who may only know us as wedding photographers, it may appear to you that this must be our slow time of the year, after all, the common thinking is, “You only work weekends, right?”
Unfortunately, that assumption cannot be farther from the truth. As a matter of fact, even as busy as we normally are, during the holiday season, it is just as busy, if not busier.
Firstly, there is a general misconception that wedding photographers only work on weekends (when the weddings take place). While it’s true there are “weekend warriors” who shoot weddings on weekends, while still working a regular full-time day-job, for the professional photographer who offer the kind of service and products that we do, there is a lot of pre and post event work.
During the holiday, while the schedule of our overall workflow often changes — e.g. we have less weddings to shoot in the winter time than in the summer (although in this part of the country we get our share of winter weddings) — what doe NOT change is the amount of work.
Add to the fact that for us, we shoot not only weddings, but family portraits and corporate assignments, the latter of which usually occur on a weekday, and you can see that, in fact, with all the usual holiday obligations, there seems to be never enough hours in a day to get everything done. Here’s what we do at this time of year:
- Continue to follow-up with clients whose weddings we shot — mainly on album production
- Review 2007 in tek
- Start planning our business strategy for 2008
- Update websites with new photos
- Design new business materials
- Meet with potential clients for 2008
- oh, and have a life!
Anyone who runs his or her own business knows just hard much work it is — putting in 60-70 hours a week is not uncommon. Running a photography business is no different.
Luckily, we love our job!
Happy Holidays!