Well I had been planning it since January but finally the time arrived. This past week I have been 1:1 with Australian master wedding and portrait photographer David A Williams right here in Hampshire. David visited us and spent time with my family and was kind enough to work over with me some of my work, album designs, marketing materials and managed to get some images of me and my family.
David is an inspiration, as well as an excellent photographer, and it is hard to express the value he will bring to my approach to wedding photography for 2009 and what a difference it will make to this Hampshire based studio.
Seminars and courses are all very good, and David ranks amongst the best in the industry when he delivers those – but you just can’t beat some 1:1 time. Much of what he suggested were minor tweaks to the way I work and these won’t affect my couples on their wedding day but I know that I’ll be delivering better work because of the investment in the time we spent talking together.
It is important for wedding photographers to improve continually and in the past I have lapped up day long seminars in a room with tens if not hundreds of photographers but I’m now looking at differentiating myself from the very many wedding photographers who are appearing in Hampshire, offering the same type of images in the same albums. I’d like to be able to give my clients something different so their wedding photography is a real reflection on their day, something wonderful and personal to them, and not a copy of a couples wedding in Australia, or Italy with images poorly copied from one of the greats – and I’m of the belief that the images and approach need to come from me, with some specific tailored guidance from a master photographer rather than sound-bites from the front of a room.
Of course I’m very fortunate – David rarely spends time in the UK, and very little of that time is devoted to 1:1 guidance.
2009 will be an amazing year for me photographing weddings across Hampshire and the surrounding counties as I put into practice new ideas and inspirations. Keep an eye on the blog for little announcements, new techniques, and at some point some new approaches.
by Mike French
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