Hey photographer friends! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! Today we’re going to share four reasons why we believe that — once you’ve photographed a wedding day — it’s in your own best interest to share the final image gallery not just with your clients, but with every wedding vendor who worked that wedding day! One of the ways that we were able to rise into the luxury market in just a few years is through network marketing. And what we’re talking about today is a big part of that! So let’s dive in.

 

 

A Good Question (And a BAD Answer)

Earlier this year, we saw a question in a Facebook group. A young gal who had just photographer her first wedding was contacted by the venue that she had photographed the wedding at. The venue asked if they could have access to the images from the wedding, and the new photographer was asking whether or not she should share the images with the wedding venue. Now, that’s a really great question to ask, and we were super grateful that she was asking in the first place. After all, sharing images from a wedding was totally new territory for her!

 

The problem was what happened next. Here’s the thing that hopefully everyone realizes about Facebook groups. Unless you’re in a group that’s being actively moderated by a professional photographer that you trust and who you know has found the kind of success that you want (like our FB Group, “Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah“)… then there are probably successful and experience photographers giving advice right alongside people who are brand new, or who are running struggling business, or who ran successful businesses 20 years ago with methods that don’t work anymore.

 

And this was definitely one of those cases, since the first person who responded to this new photographers’ question jumped in with an absolutely terrible piece of advice! 😂 They told the new photographer that she should charge the venue a fee to access the photos, and then make them sign a contract with her, stating that they’ll tag her and not alter the images, and also limiting what they can use the images for. The rest of this post is going to be our four reasons why we think that that was bad advice, and what you should do instead if you’re a wedding photographer.

 

 

Reason #1: Wedding Industries are Like Small Towns

This post wasn’t in our Facebook Group, but we immediately jumped in and shared a totally different take. We told this new photographer that making a venue sign a contract and charging them in order to access the images that you took at their venue was a great way to never be recommended by that venue or invited back to shoot there.

 

As a wedding photographer, networking with other vendors in your own local wedding network is one of the most important ways to get leads, but also to grow in your local industry. If you’re just getting started with weddings, you probably haven’t encountered this yet, but if you stick around your local wedding industry long enough, you’ll begin to realize that everyone sort of knows everyone. No matter what size city you live in, the local professional wedding vendor community is more like a small town then you might realize.

 

And this means that anything that you do that will make one vendor really appreciate you — or be really annoyed by you — will likely not just stay with that one vendor. Like we talked about in our branding workshop earlier this year, a huge part of your brand is essentially your local reputation among other wedding professionals. And being incredibly generous — or being incredibly stingy — with the images that you produce, is a great way to impact that reputation.

 

 

(It’s Not All About You)

After all, you may have taken the images, but without the florist, the venue, the dressmaker, and the wedding planner, what would those images look like? It’s easy as photographers for us to think that the images we capture are 100% created by us. And to a degree they are! But we weren’t the only ones who contributed to them. Recognizing the work of others and freely sharing your images with them is a great way to create a really positive reputation.

 

 

Reason #2: It’s Good Marketing to Share Image Galleries

Now, last year, we did a 10-part video series called “10 Free Marketing Tactics for Photographers”, and one of the big marketing avenues that we discussed was this idea of “network marketing”. Basically, this means reaching out to other wedding vendors and building a community and a network in your local wedding industry. This can not only help you book jobs, but can also help your entire industry thrive, and build a sense of community in an industry that can otherwise feel pretty lonely or isolating at times.

 

If you want to check out that specific video, the link is here. But you might remember from that video that we talked about the difference between upstream, midstream, and downstream venders. Think about it this way: most every couple books their wedding vendors in roughly the same order. They almost always will book their venue first, since the dates that that venue has available will determine when their actual wedding date is. And if the couple is going to use a full-service planner, that’s next, since their planner will help them book the rest of their vendors.

 

Every other kind of wedding vendor is either what we call “midstream” or “downsteam”. Midstream is someone who is just as likely to be booked after the photographer as before. So maybe a caterer or a partial-service planner. And “downstream” means they will almost always be booked after a photographer, like a cake artist or a rental company.

 

Focus on the Upsteam!

Whether you’re a wedding photographer or a florist, focusing on networking with vendors who are upstream from you is great way to potentially get lots of referrals. So for photographers the only people guaranteed to be upstream are venues and wedding planners. And if you’re a lower-budget photographer just getting started, you probably aren’t working with full-service planners just yet. So that leaves wedding venues. So if wedding venues are 50% or even 100% of your network-marketing strategy, and freely sharing the full gallery with them is a great way to win favor and also remind them about how great your imagery is, then it seems like a no-brainer to us.

 

 

Reason #3: You Never Know Who Knows Who

Even if we didn’t particularly love shooting at a venue or working with a particular vendor, we still share the gallery with them. For starters, like we mentioned before, every vendor contributed something to that wedding, so it just feels right to us. But on top of that, you never really know who knows who.

 

Maybe we didn’t love that venue, but maybe the same company owns another venue — which is our favorite venue in town! Or maybe we didn’t love working with that florist, but maybe her best friend is a wedding planner that we would be super excited to work with. Because that’s the thing about reputation: you have very little control over how it spreads. All you have control over is how you behave. And so we would rather everyone in our town generally have a positive view of us, than try to pick and choose who gets access to our imagery, and end up offending people throughout the industry.

 

Now, there is one exception to all of this. The only time where we don’t share a full gallery with a vendor is if that vendor substantially and negatively contributed to our clients’ wedding day. So if someone really just blows it on a wedding day, and causes a ton of stress and anxiety for us and our couple — like a wedding planner who gets drunk at the reception or a bus driver who ignores the planner’s directions and shows up 40 minutes late — we often hold back our images out of respect for the couple. After all, if you felt like one of the people you paid to help run your wedding day actively made it worse, the last thing you’d want to see is them using images from your wedding day to advertise their services.

 

 

Reason #4: When You Share Image Galleries, Your Imagery… Is Everywhere!

That actually leads right into reason #4. When you send the full gallery to the florists and the rental company and the stationary designer, in addition to the venue and the wedding planner, now all of those people are sharing your imagery. Because don’t forget, they all need things to post to their Instagrams too. But they don’t have the advantage of being professional photographers. So they’re totally dependent on what photographers choose to share with them!

 

So if you’re sending your galleries far and wide, potential couples who are researching the wedding industry in your area aren’t just seeing your imagery on your Instagram or your website, but they’re seeing your imagery all over the websites and social media pages of people throughout your local market.

 

 

How to Share Your Image Galleries

Finally, how do we do this practically? After we deliver the final wedding gallery to our couple, the very next email we send is to the full vendor list. And we mean FULL vendor list. Everyone down to the transportation and rental companies. Now obviously, this means we’re going to need a full vendor list with email addresses. So if our couple or a wedding planner didn’t give us a vendor list directly, then we make sure to ask for one before the wedding. That way, we can either do a few Google searches and get everyone’s emails, or at the very least know who to tag in all the images that we post to social media.

 

When we send that email with the full gallery, we make it clear that we hope that they use and post our images however they’d like, and also use them on their website if they need them. All we ask is that when they post on social media, they tag us. Then, we include our website and social links in that same email.

 

Now, have there been vendors in the past who shared our images and forgot to tag us? Of course there have. But there have been way more vendors who faithfully credit us, use our images all the time on their social pages and websites, and who love recommending us to couples because they know that not only do we do a great job, but that they’re going to get the images from the day as well.

 

Want More?

 

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