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Happy Thursday, photographers! Welcome back to our blog/video series all about what comes after a portrait session or wedding day: the sorting, culling, editing, and delivery of your clients’ photos! In our last two segments, we discussed backing up your images, and showed you how to keyword-sort and cull your galleries down into a more manageable number. Now, before we get to the bulk of the editing, let’s give your clients a little taste of what’s to come with a sneak-peek and/or blog!

 

Post Production Secrets Step 4: Maximize Your Client Experience with Sneak Peeks And Blogging

There are a lot of different theories when it comes to posting a sneak-peek from a wedding day. Should you post it as soon as possible, or give it more time to build excitement? Should you post it to social media, or just send it to the couple directly? Should you just post a few photos to social media, or should you write up an entire blog with dozens of photos and written copy as well? Although we certainly don’t claim to have the perfect answer for every business, we’re excited to share our theories and how we handle sneak-peeks and blogging for our lovely couples!

 

 

Why Should You Post a Wedding Sneak Peek?

Before we tell you how we do sneak peeks (and blogging) in our own wedding photography business, let’s explain why we think they’re important. For most photographers we know, it takes them between 4 and 12 weeks to edit and deliver a full wedding gallery to their couples. That number can vary drastically from photographer to photographer, and even from month to month for the same photographer. We’re a bit of an oddity in that regard, as our average turnaround for wedding galleries over the last 3.5 years is just over 3 weeks, but we still deliver the occasional wedding as late as 6 weeks near the end of our busy fall seasons!

 

If you’ve ever been married, you can probably remember how excited you were to see your wedding photos. And even if you haven’t been, then I’m sure you can at least imagine the anticipation and excitement! After months and months of planning, the day FINALLY happened. Now, all that’s left is to see the photos that captured the day! We remember from our own wedding experience that those weeks of waiting can feel SO long!

 

We believe that a sneak peek (and potentially a blog) is an important part of the wedding photography process for our couples, first and foremost, to make all that waiting more bearable! It’s like a little taste-test to keep your couples from going crazy as they await their full gallery, which is more like a 10-course dinner! Plus, it gets the couple even more excited for their final collection of images, even if it’s still weeks (or months) away. It’s also an easy way to keep your social media fresh: if you shoot once each week and always post a sneak peek to your social media pages, that’s at least one post per week to keep your followers engaged!

 

 

When to Post a Wedding Sneak Peek

Speaking of waiting, we feel like there’s a bit of a sweet spot when it comes to posting the sneak peek for our wedding couples. We know some photographers who deliver a handful of photos before the night is over, so the couple can experience some of their images before they even go to bed that night! While we think that plays really well with the millennial and Gen-Z couples who (like ourselves) are so used to instant results, we don’t think it’s the best use of your time on the night of a wedding.

 

And here’s why: we remember being SO overwhelmed by the emotion, excitement, love and joy of our wedding day, that nothing could have made us any more excited. We drove away from our wedding with our love tanks at max capacity; we were at an 11/10 on the excitement-and-full-of-joy scale. Because we were already so euphoric, seeing our wedding photos at that moment may have brought us from an 11 to an 11.5… not a great result for all that extra work.

 

Plus, if you’re anything like us, you’re exhausted when you get home from a wedding. You just worked hard for 8-12 hours, giving 110% of your creativity and emotional energy, and sometimes with additional hours of driving involved. The last thing we want to do is start going through photos and editing them at midnight — we just want to get to bed! We don’t think it’s worth further exhausting ourselves, especially since our couples are usually too busy partying with their friends and family to even check their phones until the next day anyway!

 

 

However, sending a sneak-peek the day after the wedding is another story. Waking up the morning after your wedding is a bit of a surreal experience. After months (or years) of planning, it all culminated in the biggest, most important day of your lives! And now… it’s done. It’s quiet. You roll over and WOAH! It isn’t your girlfriend or boyfriend or fiancé(e) who’s sleeping next to you… It’s your spouse! You’re MARRIED! The high of the wedding has worn off with a good night’s sleep, and they start going about their day, and returning to normal life. So we think this is the perfect time to bring your couples back up to a 10/10 with some wedding images!

 

If you can’t get to the sneak-peek the day after the wedding, do it as soon as you can. You should aim for no more than 48 hours after the wedding. Why? Well, no matter when you send them their professional photos, your couple is going to be inundated with iPhone pics, basically from the minute they walk down the aisle. And in their excitement, they are just SO eager to share whatever they can with the world! When they post the first photo or two from the wedding, you want it to be your images with your name attached, putting your brand and your best work in front of their network… not an iPhone selfie that the maid-of-honor took — or even worse — the low-quality snapshot that the bride’s aunt took with her point and shoot! 😜

 

 

How to Choose Images for a Sneak Peek

How you select images from your sneak peek will depend on how you plan on posting them. If Instagram is the goal, then you’re capped at 10 images for a single post. However, if you’re going to post a blog (more on that in a second), then we think 25-40 images is a more appropriate number. Since we post a sneak peek a day or two after the wedding, then a more extensive blog 5-10 days after the wedding, we’ll aim for about 6-10 images in an initial sneak peek for social media, then a more robust count for the blog (which will include those original 6-10 favorites).

 

But no matter how many images we’re choosing, those keywords that you learned about in Step 2 are about to come in handy! If you’ve ever spent any time browsing bridal magazines, or if you follow any of the major players on social media, you probably already know that portraits of the couple and detail photos are most often the ones that these companies display. And there’s a reason! These not only express the feel and aesthetic of the wedding day, but they often make the day look most high-end and beautiful. Of course, if your style is more photojournalistic, maybe it’s those darker and more dramatic reception or ceremony moments that will make the sneak peek. It’s up to you!

 

But no matter which categories you want to include, now that you’ve culled the entire wedding (see Step 3), all you have to do is just view the 2-star images from each of your top categories, and choose the best-of-the-best to post for their sneak-peek! And if you end up with more than 10 images (what Instagram allows you to share in one post), you can always save another 5-10 for a second sneak peek. Bonus points: use a scheduling app (like Later.App that we use!) to schedule that post at the same time!

 

 

Should Wedding Photographers Blog in 2022?

It’s 2022. No one reads blogs anymore. Right?! Well… not so fast. Wedding blogs may be the exception to the rule nowadays, as the HSP Blog gets anywhere from 10,000-25,000 views each year! And our wedding, engagement and surprise proposal blogs are driving a lot of that traffic! If you aren’t blogging for your wedding or portrait photography business, we want to strongly encourage you to consider doing so, and turn blogging into part of your workflow.

 

We believe that blogs are still powerful tools for your photography business for four reasons. First, if the sneak peek is like a taste-test and the main gallery is like dinner, then a blog is an appetizer – the perfect in-between. Especially if your delivery time is on the longer end, a blog might be a perfect way to bridge that gap between sneak peek and final gallery, and give your couple a hearty hold-over to keep them excited for their main gallery!

 

The second reason is that when you share the blog with your couples, they’re likely to share it to their own social media and send it to their friends and family over text and email, thus exposing your beautiful work to their personal network! If you connected well with a guest or a member of the wedding party on the wedding day, or even if a random guest you never talked to just saw how well you were serving the couple, they may already have you in mind for their own wedding. But when your couple sends them your blog — boom! They’re sold. They can’t wait to reach out to you when they get engaged.

 

 

 

Third, a blog is a more substantial way to share your best work and tell the wedding day from your own perspective. It’s like a mini-portfolio for every single job. Plys, if you write from the heart and share as your true authentic self, then potential couples who read it will get to know you better. And if they’re a perfect match for your personality and style (they’re called your “ideal client” in the marketing world), they’ll begin to fall in love with your work and be more inclined to hire you should they get engaged later on. And attracting the right person is a hugely important marketing goal! Along that same vein, if someone reading is NOT the right fit for you, and your personalities don’t mesh at all, they’ll learn that from how you write your blog and show your images, and be less inclined to hire you. And believe it or not, repelling the wrong client is also an important marketing goal!

 

Finally, blogging is good for your website’s “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO. This basically just means that if you blog, people are more likely to find you when they google the name of your city or the name of the venue you shot at, followed by “Wedding Photography” or “Family Photography” or whatever it is you’re blogging about! Google loves a website that’s frequently updated, so posting a blog (or three) every week will help show Google that your website is worth bringing searchers to!

 

 

How We Blog our Weddings and Portrait Sessions

Hopefully we’ve convinced you that blogging is worth doing. Especially since it’s probably not as much work as you think it is! We’ve built it into our workflow, and blog for every single wedding, engagement session, and surprise proposal we photograph. Yes, even in 2020 and 2021, when we photographed between 80 and 100 weddings, engagement sessions and proposals each year!

 

When it comes to blogging, you’ll do the same selection, you did for the sneak-peek, focusing most heavily on portraits and details. But this time, you can allow yourself to choose more of your favorite images instead of such a tight selection. Plus, since you’re no longer limited to 10 images, you can select a handful of images from other parts of the day, like the getting ready suite, the wedding ceremony, or the dance floor! Once you’ve selected them and put them in the right order, you’ll edit them (more on that next week).

 

Then, write a few paragraphs about the couple and their day, and do it from the heart. This is often the hardest part for most photographers — we’re photographers, not writers, after all — but it doesn’t have to be! We often see photographers try to do too much, get overwhelmed, and give up. Jon Acuff says that “90% done and shared with the world is better than 100% perfect and stuck in your head.” If you expect yourself to write eloquent poetry, or encapsulate their entire life story and each moment of the wedding day, you’ll never write a single blog, much less 2 or 3 each week! In order to make the process manageable, we stick with a simple three-paragraph model that we learned from other photographers. The only real “rule” is to aim for no fewer than 300 words since (according to most SEO/Google metrics) anything shorter than that isn’t really a blog. But don’t make it TOO long, or people won’t read it at all!

 

 

We hope that this primer on sneak peeks and blogs has been helpful for you! Next week, we’ll finally dive into editing and creating your own editing workflow. But for now, consider how you’ll work sneak peeks and blogging into your own workflow!

 

Want More?

 

Click HERE to get your free copy of our eBook: “5 Essential Tips for Turning your Side-Hustle into a Full-Time Photography Business.” You’ll also be subscribed to our newsletter, so our newest content, weekly encouragement, and exclusive offers will be delivered right to your inbox!

 

 

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Check out the other segments in this blog series!

• • Post Production Secrets Step 1: Best Backup System for Wedding and Portrait Photographers
  • Post Production Secrets Step 2: How Keyword Sorting in Lightroom Will Change Your Life
  • Post Production Secrets Part 3: Have You Been Culling/Selecting Wedding Images WRONG this Whole Time?!
  • Post Production Secrets Step 4: Maximize Your Client Experience with Sneak Peeks And Blogging
  • Post Production Secrets Step 5: How We Quickly Edit 1,000s of Wedding Photos in Adobe Lightroom
  • Post Production Secrets Step 6: Best Photo Delivery Service for Wedding Photographers