I may, possibly, be on the cusp of joining the out of work masses. Work has been a bit slow the last 18 months and there is now an offer to buy out the company… which may result in my services no longer being required!

Not ideal… just starting to look at options for what I can do to cover the mortgage on my rapidly approaching negative equity house (so selling may not by an option anyway). Fun fun fun no.

Currently toying with the idea of giving the wedding photography gig a proper go. Only done it for friends and family thus far (given the camera gear technically belongs to said company though this may incur additional expenses). As would the loss of the company car. And computer. Life is looking a lot more complicated than it did an hour ago 🙁

Wedding photography sounds good. You could try a bit of corporate photography too, my bro’s company pay a guy £700 to take photographs of their robots for brochures – sounds like some kinky niche porn, but it’s not.

Double Post

Get and build a swanky looking website NOW whilst you still have access to all the gear…

Get yourself a couple of paid jobs in before the looming redundancy, so you can then afford your own SLR, laptop and peripheries… Otherwise you’ll be stuck without the gear which will be essential!

Wedding photography is a competitive market, lots of people do it. But… If you’ve got a good enough website, somebody is going to give you a phonecall in the first place. And once you’ve done a couple of gigs, if you’re good they’ll start recommending you to their friends etc. My mate did about 3 or 4 a couple of years ago just as favours for friends and family. He got asked to do so many more as a result, he ended up turning a load of work down as it wasn’t the avenue he really wanted to pursue…

Good luck, but work hard now whilst you’ve still got the benefits of car, laptop and camera you have access to, and it will be loads easier when it happens.

Got a website for my landscape stuff, but need to sort out the wedding one (I have the domain already, just needs developed).

Thus far I have done 3 or 4 weddings, possibly got another coming up next year already as people like what I do. It may not come to it as I may be able to go into consultancy but with the construction industry on it’s knees at the moment that is looking like a bit of a non-starter.

Living in the Lakes though… lots of weddings in these here parts…

Emailed a couple of friends who do/did wedding photography for a living, see what they have to say about the whole thing! Should really go down the photography route at some stage though since I keep winning awards!

I doubt there will be enough in just wedding photography, given they happen once a week there’s only one of you, so the best you’ll get is one a week, check the sums to see if you can live on it, plus they don’t happen every weekend. (I once eked out an existence as a jobbing Photographer, back in the days you used to have to know stuff before you could be one).

You’ll need to consider other things, Christenings, Portraiture, nowadays work with a ‘makeover’ place, then you’ll need to do what we used to call spivving, going to social functions taking everyone’s pics and getting them up on a board whilst they’re still in the room and hope that they’re pissed enough to order at the end.

There’s an Art to good wedding photography and a procedure, a good photographer runs the back end of a wedding, do the groups as well as the happy snap catch em unaware crap, I used to use at least a medium format stand camera for the groups and a 35 mil for happy snappy..

So having said all that with digital, photoshoppy and a bit of imagination, no reason you can’t give it a go, (just excuse my cynicism) and take the guys advice about the web shop and doing as much prep as possible whilst you’re still employed..