Hello there,
I'm officially on maternity leave - that is, I'm due in four weeks and I've finally finished all I had to do for the 2024 brides and grooms. I vividly remember my first postpartum, when I barely had enough mental space to remember to brush my teeth for the first few days, so I certainly didn't want to enter this new maternity without being up to date with my renderings for the 2024 couples.
That's now done, and I'm looking ahead to 2025! This season will mark the arrival of new things for my brides and grooms, because 2024 is clearly a pivotal year for me, which has led me to question the way my business works.
A quick recap of the changes I've been through this year:
Eight days ago, I moved to the other side of France. From Lorraine, I moved to Loire-Atlantique, where I'm originally from. This move obviously has a lot of consequences for my business: relocate? Work all over France? What should I keep in my offers, and what should I change?
Side note: moving out while being eight-month pregnant is a project I wouldn't recommend, but you can't choose your timing, and timing has always been my strong point (lol not at all, the scriptwriter of my life is permanently on LSD - I honestly can't think of any other explanation).
I'm about to welcome our second daughter, while my first has just turned two. Managing a professional activity and two babies is also going to be a challenge in itself.
Side note n°2: my daughters are two years apart, which isn't much. After a medical journey of more than two years for our first child, the scriptwriter in my life (still on LSD, obviously) graced me with a surprise pregnancy before I even resumed my new medical journey in order to get pregnant for the second time. I thank him warmly, but I wish he'd change his fuel.
My move and the early end of my season following my pregnancy were an opportunity to think about my wedding photography business and what I wanted to change or keep after my move.
This reflection led to several changes that I wanted to tell you about in today's article.
All-inclusive packages
This is probably the most significant change in my wedding photography offerings, and is a natural consequence of my move and the evolution of my business.
Up until this year, my packages broke down as follows:
A fixed fee based on the service required (number of hours and days of presence)
Travel expenses calculated on a case-by-case basis and agreed with the bride and groom.
However, this approach to travel expenses posed a number of problems:
Since you obviously want to be fair to the bride and groom, you tend to go for the cheapest solution, sometimes to the detriment of your rest and well-being. My brides and grooms never asked me to make this kind of sacrifice (and would probably have advised me not to do it had they known), but I realize that I used to do it naturally. Example: “No, I'm not going to take that train that leaves at 9am because it's 40 euros more expensive, I'll leave at 5am that's fine.” It is fine for one event, but make that call for 4 or 5 weddings throughout the year and it's a debt of sleep and fatigue that impacts my entire season.
I was less reactive when it came to booking, since I depended on external validation, which sometimes took a few days to arrive (which is normal, people work, they have a life, they can't react at a moment's notice just because it suits you).
I've always been an anxious person, and depending on external circumstances for part of my service (in this case, validation of the bride and groom) was stressful.
I'm doing more and more weddings all over France. I'm not complaining at all, and it's a real privilege to be able to discover new places, but more frequent travel means more logistics to organize. Bringing all this in-house saved me time and peace of mind.
For all these reasons, from 2025 onwards, all my packages include travel expenses for every wedding taking place in France. There's nothing extra for the bride and groom, whether I'm covering a wedding in my region or on the other side of France. I take care of all the reservations myself, and if I want a more expensive train ticket, a better hotel or whatever, that's up to me, and the bride and groom are not affected by my decisions.
What happens when I travel to a wedding?
I always arrive at least the day before the wedding. On the one hand, this means I never run the risk of arriving late for an event, and on the other, it gives me time to scout out the area and take photos of the environment to add to the reportage. These images (which should have their own article, I'll work on that) are a 'bonus' that I like to add to the reportage, as they help to tell 'the story before the story' so to speak, by showing the atmosphere of the place or surroundings where the bride and groom choose to get married. It's also an opportunity for me to go on photo walks, to discover places I'm not familiar with, to try new things in photography. In short, I take time for myself before working, while making sure that this time is useful to the bride and groom. It's a win-win!
Accompanying the bride and groom
This is the second major project I've started this year for the 2025 season: rethinking the way I work for couples and create their images.
I've already talked about it on this blog, but I'm making a constant effort to train myself regularly in wedding photography, learning from photographers I admire, discovering new techniques, new approaches to photography and so on. Little by little, this training and reflection has enabled me to better analyze my work and the best way to create images my clients (and I) will enjoy.
2024 marked the arrival in my work of new things regarding photography technique, notably chiaroscuro, a particular rendering that plays with light and shadow and requires real thought when composing the image. Up until then, I'd found it hard to trust myself to compose an image, to ask the bride and groom to do specific poses, because I wanted to obtain this image and this type of rendering. Through the particular aesthetic of chiaroscuro, which makes it imperative to compose the image, I began to apply a more editorial approach to wedding photography, which came to mix with the classic reportage approach.
The editorial approach, as I mentioned here, is a more “scenographic” approach to wedding photography. It's about composing an image rather than simply capturing reality as and when it happens. It's about carefully crafting an image in order to get a specific aesthetic. But this dynamic can only be achieved with the bride and groom. With their participation, their trust, and in line with their desires.
This brings us to the entire pre-wedding period. Over the years, I've set up and developed a follow-up document that enables me to take note of all the bride and groom's wishes regarding their wedding. What was missing from these preparatory discussions, however, was an educational dimension. How can I pass on to these couples the knowledge I've acquired through the weddings I've worked on? How could I get them to think about subjects that had probably never occurred to them because, unlike me, they hadn't attended dozens of events with a thousand different issues?
The answer came in the form of an idea that wasn't mine, but was suggested to me by the (very) talented, (very) patient and (very) kind Pascal Vo: to create a magazine for brides and grooms, in which I'd write down all the advices, remarks, anecdotes, real-life stories - in short, anything that might help to give the bride and groom shaping their wedding photography service.
Such a beautiful project in theory. Such a painfully long challenge in real life! Dozens of hours were spent on this, firstly because designing a magazine means designing a layout, and I'm not a graphic designer. When it came to the editorial side of things, I also was quickly disillusioned. You see, at first I thought “oh well, you've got a blog, so you'll have something to work from”. Well, it turns out that I don't, because the content of this magazine is completely new, and I'm obviously incapable of not getting bored of my own writing, so I had to start from scratch. I've also tried to approach things in a much more concrete and pedagogical way: what do I recommend for such and such a sequence, depending on the desired rendering, lighting conditions, etc.? In short, there's everything in this magazine, and after hours of research, writing and rewriting, layout reworked 18 times, the result is a 70-page document whose first print run I'm currently awaiting for validation before ordering the 2025 copies. My aim is to send them to the bride and groom by post by Christmas! If they're not interested at all, at the very least it'll be a thick booklet with a nice cover to put on (or under) their coffee table.
Regardless of the object's usefulness (even though I do hope it is useful for the persons I wrote it for), I'm very proud to have managed to put it together this year, despite the season being in full swing, despite the move to be planned, despite the pregnancy, in short, despite life in general.
This magazine is included in every wedding photography offer. Of course, it's provided to the bride and groom at no extra cost, and allows me to offer 'a little more' than just a photo service. It's very gratifying for me, and I hope it will help to enhance the customer experience I offer and facilitate the discussions I have with each couple as to the content of their wedding reportage!
Side note: this magazine doesn't change the content of the discovery calls I make with couples. Whether we work together afterwards or not, I don't withhold information, and I always try to give the best advice I can if asked for it. This magazine is designed to take a more comprehensive approach to photo services, allowing couples to browse at their own pace and in their own way.
What I want for my 2025 wedding season
I hope and wish to continue photographing brides and grooms, while improving the support I offer them, and I hope to have the chance to continue criss-crossing France to support the couples who put their trust in me!
There's little chance you'll see me back on this blog before the end of the year, as I'm currently entering my ninth month of pregnancy, and all the best will in the world won't change the fact that post-partum is a challenge during which we're mostly trying to remember when we brushed our teeth and survive the lack of sleep. So Happy New Year, just in case I wouldn't be back before then.
See you soon (well not so much but you get me)
Manon
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