By: 10 REASONS WHY IT’S HARDER TO GET WORK THAN IT USED TO BE
Article written by Adam Johnson (ARJ Photography).
It’s the most discussed topic in wedding photography facebook groups and often the same sorts of answers – ‘stick in there’, ‘blame Brexit’, ‘it’s not you it’s the industry’… so we thought we’d put together our thoughts on this discussion together for you here on the NineDotsZine. As with anything NineDots we welcome discussion and debate so let us know what you think of our 10 reasons why it’s harder to get work than it used to be (yeah that’s the snappiest title we could come up with)!
1. The “industry is over-saturated” chestnut
Right ok. Let’s work on this myth first because it’s the most common complaint. The number of weddings in the UK hovers around 250,000 per year. Of course, not all of those will have a photographer for whatever reason – some won’t want one, others won’t be able to afford one, and that will include all marriages from the two-witness intimate ceremonies in registry offices right up to the extravaganzas we see as ‘normal’ weddings. But nevertheless that’s a big number.
It’s almost impossible to accurately predict the number of wedding photographers in the UK but I found an online estimate of 50,000 from a couple of years ago, and there’s no trend data so this is the most useless paragraph on any article anywhere, sorry.
What we can say is that awareness of “the industry” is at an all time high. When we started out, you had your little circle of friends in your local area and that was your benchmark for how ‘the industry’ was doing. If you were all doing well it was boom time, if you were all struggling it was the end.
Now, with large community groups like ours at NineDots, you have a wider, nationwide (and international) view of ‘the industry’… So you get what should be a more balanced and realistic view. However, it’s important to note a few things… First of all, people ‘doing well’ don’t like to gloat about it on the whole, but people who are struggling will rightly come to these groups to ask how other people are doing. So you will naturally hear more from the people struggling. And then the comments on those sorts of posts will often be from others who are struggling, so you will always get a skewed view of the successful vs struggling argument.
So realistically what the industry is over-saturated with is awareness of each other and how we’re doing. This can lead to two things – despondency, because everyone else is apparently doing better (don’t forget people like to bend the truth too)… or it can lead to determination to keep up, when you realise it’s still more than possible to make a decent living in this game.
I’ll finish this point with one of my favourite quotes I’ve heard about this in the last couple of years in response to the ‘everyone has a camera’ argument… “Everyone has had a pencil for years, but not everyone is a best-selling author.”
2. Photographers will work anywhere
This is an often overlooked point in my view. The biggest trend over the last 5-10 years has been photographers working nationwide instead of locally. I see photographers from all over the country coming to work at venues local to me, and equally 75% of my weddings are outside my area. Each year I tend to do fewer weddings locally. And as the trend grows it gathers pace, because as we know client recommendations are a strong source of business so the more you work ‘out of area’ the more you’re likely to work out of area. And the more this happens, the more you’ll have to work just to get weddings at the venues down the road because you’re competing with photographers from all over the country. To me this is vastly different than when I started 10 years ago.
3. SEO doesn’t work any more
Yeah this is another big one… I started shooting weddings in 2010. I came from a marketing job, with experience of things like google adwords, building websites and SEO. This was a strong advantage back then – before wordpress themes, before Yoast, before any of the website stuff we now take for granted, and it allowed me to steal a march in the SEO race and top google for almost any keyword I wanted to top google for. Fast forward and the online marketing world is a very different place. Unrecognisable in fact.
The thing to remember about SEO is that it’s now arguably the most competitive online marketing arena. An analogy would be those old school markets with traders shouting things like “TEN BANANAS, FIFTY PENCE” but there’s a hundred of them shouting it at the same time and each one trying to be louder than the next. That’s the ‘race for page one’ we’re all in for SEO. It’s a stressful race because whatever the experts tell you, it’s impossible to know how Google ranks people. It’s also a never-ending race, there’s no finish line, unless you keep up with the current so-called tactics, someone else will come along and shout louder about their bananas than you do, and then you’re off page one, and once you’re off page one you basically don’t exist any more. Put that into perspective of the 50,000 photographers thing and the fact that 0.02% of them can make it to page one. Yeah… how much are your bananas?! So SEO isn’t dead, it’s just as difficult as it’s ever been and it’s only going to get more and more and more difficult until there’s a reinvention of the search landscape. And that will definitely happen because currently search isn’t really working well for anyone – ‘advertisers’ (remember SEO is a form of advertising) or searchers – because the search favours those businesses who are ‘beating the system’ rather than those with the best result for the search.
BUT is SEO just a smokescreen? This is what I often ask myself. I’ve always been in a position since the early 2010s that around two-thirds to three-quarters of my enquiries come from SEO. At the peak of my numbers that was around 600-750 enquiries a year, just from SEO. And that’s amazing right? Wrong. And this is the mistake too many people make, they focus on the enquiry numbers as a measure of success. So when I look at my booking data, I see that 15-20% of those come from SEO, and that’s dropping every year. At time of writing I have 8 weddings booked for 2021, and 1 of them is from SEO.
If you can make it past the first hurdle and get into those page one positions, then SEO is wonderful at delivering clicks. If your website does its job with strong calls to action, then SEO is wonderful at delivering enquiries. But what SEO is not wonderful at, unless you’ve got an ultra strong proposition backed up by well-honed sales processes, is delivering bookings. So while SEO is seen as the golden child amongst wedding photographers, it probably isn’t the answer to your problems, especially when you consider that if you start ‘doing SEO’ now it might be another year or more before you see the results.
And don’t get me started on cornerstone content and funnels… well do, because I’m quite into it, but I’ll leave that for another day!
4. You’re not working hard enough
Right we’ve reached the shit in the shit sandwich. This is the harsh section.
It’s not enough to shoot, edit, stick a few photos on instagram and facebook, write the odd blog post and have a website that sits there waiting for the people to drop by. It’s just not. It once was, I rode the crest of that wave. That’s not how it works any more and I’m honestly as sad about it as you are.
So many people describe wedding photography as their full time job, but are you really working full time? I had full time jobs before this – that was 35-50 hours a week in the office plus around 10 hours a week commuting. When I was in the office I was at my desk for most of those 35+ hours, working. I was watched by a boss who would let me know if I chatted too long and I was expected to deliver my work within strict deadlines. One time I even had to press a button when I left my desk and my time away from my desk was logged and had to be kept within a certain tolerance. Yeah. Reality.
Are you really doing this ‘full time’ or do you just describe it as that because it’s your only job? Could you work harder? For most people – me included – the answer is yes. I’m sure it’s this way for most self employed people, not just photographers.
What could you be doing? Researching, learning, studying, listening, networking, creating, re-working, re-designing, re-engineering… there’s honestly no end to the work you could be doing on everything from your website to your client experience, to your sales processes, your automations… the business landscape is moving quicker than it’s ever moved before and the only way to keep up or ahead is constant work.
Tangent. Did you get into this business for that? For the relentless pursuit of the next client? Maybe not. I didn’t, in all honesty but over time I’ve grown to love the game of business and it beats the 50 hours a week behind a desk and 10 hours a week on cold, smelly trains.
It’s not enough to just do the work of the business as I mentioned – shoot, edit, website, blog, instagram, facebook. That’s the work, but pushing the business forward needs more than that, especially if your prices are higher.
5. Cameras are too good, there’s no skill involved any more
The only truth here is that it’s harder than ever to blag your way along in this industry now, and that you can no longer – thanks to iPhone portrait mode – rely on a blurry background to preserve your professional status.
Remember what I said earlier: “”Everyone has had a pencil for years, but not everyone is a best-selling author.””
Your job as a photographer is to do more than the camera can do. The camera has no understanding of photography. That’s a fact. It has zero understanding of light, composition or moment. It’s easier than ever to render the scene in front of a camera with good exposure and white balance, it’s easier than ever to edit a photo to look nice thanks to Lightroom and presets, and even good in-camera jpegs across all brands. But the thing that happens in between is photography, and that’s your job. So if you’re relying on the quality of camera and ease of edit to get you by then yeah, it’s going to be tough for you.
The job of a photographer has always been, is, and always will be light, moment and composition. Vision. Your vision. Focus on that and forget the camera and computer tech, and you will create work that stands out, which leads nicely onto my next point.
6. There are too many workshops! Stop training everyone to be good!
When we got into the workshop game back in 2015, wedding photography was improving as a genre, but was still looked down upon by ‘real photographers’ as the photography that you did if you you couldn’t be a real photographer, awash with weekend warriors and recently redundants.
Five years on the average quality of wedding photography worldwide has risen massively, thanks in part to the abundance of workshops, online training, youtube videos and collaboration.
But get this. The playing field is level. You have access to all the same training as everyone else. You have access to all the same free resources to improve your photography and business as everyone else.
And when the playing field is level, you can’t blame the field or the game.
7. Your ego
Why won’t you exhibit at that wedding fair? Why won’t you do that discount? Why won’t you put your name down for that referral in that facebook group?
Ego is the killer of many things in business and creativity. And the longer you do this, there’s a pressure from somewhere to charge more, to work less, to do more ‘you’ and do less ‘for the clients’.
Ask yourself, honestly, whether your ego is controlling elements of your business and holding you back.
8. You think networking is for losers
Yeah. This was me a few years ago. In my little SEO comfort zone.
So networking is “the action or process of interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional or social contacts.” This could be other photographers, planners, florists, DJ’s, videographers, dress shops, stationers, celebrants etc etc etc.
The trouble with photographers (see point 7) is that we’ve convinced ourselves we’re at the top of the food chain in this industry, and that people need us more than we need them (see “how dare they use my images without credit” etc) and so we sit here on our self-constructed pedestal and expect the industry to bring us our dinner.
No. It doesn’t work like that. This is a people industry in an industry full of people who aren’t our customers but who will help our customers get to us. It could be fostering a small referral network in your area. It could be getting images to that planner/florist/etc who you worked with at last week’s wedding before they asked. It could be offering to shoot your local make-up artists next lookbook (whatever one of those is) proactively. Yes these are business tactics and some involve working for free (shock-horror) but done genuinely they can create some of the strongest business relationships you can imagine, with a constant back and forth stream of referrals.
9. Videographers shooting photo (and vice versa)
This is a wider discussion for sure. I noticed a trend probably 3-4 years ago of photographers beginning to shoot video more and more. That then put pressure on videographers who in the last 1-2 years have now started to offer photography. So the two industries have begun to merge. I personally don’t think they’ll fully blend together but in the classic venn diagram that centre zone will become bigger and the overlap will continue to grow.
But really they’re not stealing your business any more than you’re capable of stealing theirs. Speak to anyone in either industry and they’ll tell you the two jobs/approaches are vastly different. A good videographer won’t always make a good photographer and vice versa.
10. The photography industry is in decline
Demand for good photography has never been higher across all sectors. The figures I started this article with show that the wedding industry isn’t shrinking. Yes there may be more “people with cameras” floating around it but go back to points 5 and 6 to see why your job is to be more than “people with cameras” and back to point 4 to remind yourself that sometimes you just need to work harder but also smarter on the right things that are going to benefit your business short, medium and long term. And if you can’t think of anything to do, then learn something new for your business or re-work existing elements of your business to bring them bang up to date, or work on creating the best client experience ever.
You can’t control the industry, all you can control is your slice of it. So go and grab a bigger slice. It’s on you.
Thanks for reading 10 REASONS WHY IT’S HARDER TO GET WORK THAN IT USED TO BE by NineDots. NineDots is the ultimate wedding photography community. We run the infamous NineDots Gathering wedding photography non-conference every November in London, and ongoing content and awards to help wedding photographers improve through NineDots Membership. Join the greatest wedding photography community in the world!