Outsourcing your wedding photography can be an exciting step for your business. You’ve spent a lot of time and energy establishing yourself as a professional. Building a business isn’t for the faint of heart. And if you’ve stuck it out, you’re likely finding yourself with a thriving, successful wedding photography business.
But now, you’re almost overwhelmed. Perhaps it’s time for you to consider outsourcing your wedding photography. Not sure if you’re ready? Read on, and maybe you’ll see that the time for outsourcing is closer than you thought.
You have an established editing style that you love
One of the most important aspects of your wedding photography business to have in place before you begin outsourcing is to have an established editing style.
It takes a good deal of time to hone in on your style. It may even take years to perfect it. Your editing style conveys so many unspoken words to your clients: Quality, professionalism, personality, brand, and even emotions. Your editing style is the backbone of your brand. It can often set you apart from others in the industry. And many times, a client will choose their photographer based on their editing style.
Before you consider outsourcing your wedding photography, I would make sure that you have a really good grasp on your editing style. You should know it inside and out. Most perfected editing styles use just one preset for color photos, and one preset for black and white images.
If you’re struggling to find your style, I’d be happy to help! I have helped several photographers develop a style they love. Whether it’s tweaking an existing preset, or creating a whole new one, I would love to help you get closer to creating a style for your brand that you’re proud of.
Do your images look consistent from gallery to gallery? Do you find yourself editing faster because you know exactly how you like your images to look? Can you verbalize exactly how you like your images to look?
If you can say, “Yes” to all or most of those questions, you are already going to be an ideal client for most private photo editors.
You have a well-organized workflow
One of the biggest mistakes many busy professional photographers make is committing to outsourcing to a private photo editor before they ready on the backend.
It’s really easy to get excited about outsourcing. It means that your portrait or wedding photography business is growing. You may just hate editing, so you want to hand it off as soon as possible. While that’s great and all, sometime no matter how good the intentions are, you’re simply just not organized well enough in your workflow.
When considering outsourcing your wedding photography, you want to make sure that you already have a very solid, organized workflow. From shooting the wedding, to culling, sneak peeks, blogging, and editing the entire wedding, having a workflow that gets you from point “A” to point “B” seamlessly every time is key.
Why? Because when you decide to work with a Private Photo Editor, your organization not only affects you and your business, but it will also affect the personal life and business of your editor. Check out another post I wrote about having a professional relationship with your editor.
Do you provide a consistent client experience to every bride and groom? Are you delivering wedding galleries to your clients within the same amount of time for each couple? Do you find it easy to keep up with blogging, bookkeeping, and other behind-the-scenes tasks?
If the answer is, “Yes,” it sounds like you are well on your way to being organized enough to work with a Private Photo Editor.
You’re running low on time
One of the most popular reasons for wanting to begin outsourcing your wedding photography is because you are finding yourself running low on time.
Maybe you’re missing spending time with your family and kids. Maybe you’re wishing you had more time to spend on that new project you’ve been dreaming up for your business. Or perhaps you’re just drained; you dread editing days, and you’re just looking for a little bit of “me time.”
While needing more time for all the other things of life may seem like the perfect reason to start outsourcing, you shouldn’t let it be the only reason. The two other topics we talked about today (having an established editing style and workflow) are the most important to have in place before letting your desire for more free time dictate when you start outsourcing to an editor.
I hope you found this post helpful as you begin considering outsourcing your wedding photography (or portrait photography). If it was helpful, I’d love for you to leave a comment below. Click here for more articles related to Photographers.
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