I can’t count how many times we have heard our client’s parents say they wish we were around when they got married!! Now that may be so but around the time most of us boomers got married there wasn’t much to wedding photography or even portrait for that matter. Up until very recently non-commercial photography was seen more as a craft, a set of skills that one learns and can repeat over and over. Photographers fit right into the Mass Generation brought about during the rise of one size fits all production.
The role of the craftsman was not really to be creative but to be technically sound and able to reproduce the same product over and over. The apprentice was trained in the ways of the master and only released when she was technically sound and met the criteria of the master. In photography there was little room for creativity for many reasons not the least of which was the limitations of the available technology. I remember spending hours making multiple negative and positive exposures onto lithographic film from the negative in my enlarger just to get a very high contrast B&W image. Those times are gone now, it takes me minutes to do the same now.
So what does this have to do with your parent’s photographer? Well, back in the day the range of choices available to a photographer’s clients were pretty limited it was basically what size photo do you want and how many and do you want them glossy or matte? If you were lucky and had a photographer who was skilled in the darkroom you might even get a choice of toning. Beyond paper there was little else we could do with our pictures. Often the ended up in books or those special cardboard photo files and they were soon forgotten.
Times are different now…your choices are almost unlimited and are increasing by the day. Today, this day you can your photos printed on paper, canvas,coffee mugs and rugs. You can also have them made into books, slide shows with your own favorite music. And if that doesn’t suite you, there is always a pod cast, an online show on your blog and one sized to carry around in your phone …especially if you have an iPhone.
The problem is the choices are increasing that even the biggest tech weinies can’t keep up. My point is as photographers we need to educate our clients on the vast possibilities available to them. So many in the industry are still focused on selling paper prints to clients who really might rather have some help figuring out other options.
So let’s start giving our clients some remarkable new choices and here’s a thought lets include them in figuring out what those choices can be!!
