Professional Wedding Photographers Move Over to USB Memory Sticks
If you’re one of the estimated 50,000 professional photographers in the UK you already know you’re in a highly competitive market and with thousands of students leaving college every year clutching a photography degree the competition for business is not getting any easier!
Couple this with the falling price of professional photography equipment and throw into the mix the flexibility that digital photography offers the “enthusiastic amateur” and you have an interesting challenge.
With the flurry of “apps” now on the market that tweak, adapt and enhance images it’s easy to understand why the industry is fearful of its future. Silly comments like the one last week from Marissa Mayer Yahoo’s CEO whose company owns and runs Flickr – On Tuesday of this week Mayer said "There's no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing, really, as a professional photographer."
Her comments however misguided do demonstrate that a growing number of people including high powered CEO’s think that taking photographs of a professional quality is now easy and the natural extension of this is to think that you don’t need professional photographers anymore.
But whilst the barriers of entry are low (to buy the kit) and whilst some people will always go for the “cheap option” and pay “cash” to an enthusiast with a camera they run the risk of ending up with poorly framed, poorly shot and poorly printed results. You can’t re-run a wedding or a christening because “your mate” screwed up the photography!
Professional photography is a craft and a camera in the hand of a professional can produce stunning results. I think I can play golf but even if I use the same clubs as Tiger Woods I can’t get my handicap below 19! Good equipment can help, good editing software can help a little more but employing a good professional photographer is the only way to ensure you get stunning photos of those cherished moments!
To help their cause professional photographers are upping their marketing and are adopting USB memory sticks in preference to CD’s or DVD’s. Printed or engraved USB memory sticks offer an exciting and innovative way to present a portfolio of photographs. The memory sticks can be supplied in a wide range of shapes, designs and styles and they can be engraved or printed up with the photographers logo, website address and contact phone number.
It’s little touches like this that will help to differentiate a professional photographer that invests in his business from a new start-up that might just be looking at photography as a way of earning a “few quid on the side”.