A few weeks ago on Twitter, Chris Brogan, a blogger on social media, had taken down his Facebook fan page because as he said, “it’s not about me.”  He recognized that in trying to build buzz and create more followers, it’s most productive not to build fan groups but to reach out to those he serves and spend time focusing on them.  I took this to heart and really thought about how this sums up the attitude we should all have in our businesses.  Our photography businesses are not about our services – they are about how well we can use our talent to serve our clients.

With the busyness of wedding season upon us, it’s easy to start feeling overwhelmed - each week can easily start seeming like a never-ending game of playing catch up and the work just keeps piling up.  With so many tasks that need our attention, it’s no wonder that so many photographers struggle with time management.  So how exactly do you prioritize and decide what matters most? When the season is hectic, we need to boil things back down to the basics and ask ourselves one major question: who do we serve?

For every wedding photographer there will always be one wedding that he or she will never forgot no matter how long they’ve been in the business.  Their first one. For me, it was March of 2004.  I was second shooting for David Jay and I had literally no experience (or interest, to be honest!) in weddings.  At that point while I was still in college, I had only even attended one other wedding in my life I had virtually no expectations going into shoot my first wedding.

Album Design.  About a year ago, if you had mentioned these two words, a look of utter dread would have come over me, sweat would have started trickling down my face, and I would have wanted to crawl back into bed. (I’m only halfway joking here.)  For me, album design had come to mean endless hours of back and forth correspondence with the client, utter frustration when the client said they didn’t want to purchase additional pages of my pre-design, and complete bewilderment when a client would change a beautiful sequence I had crafted into an odd arrangement of some of my not-so-favorite images.