October « 2011 « Mimetic Muscles: The Muscles of Expression

Archive for October 2011

www.RealDepthOfFieldWeddings.com

Nearly 2 years since the launch of our first website www.RealDepthOfField.com we are now proud to launch our 2nd website dedicated entirely to weddings & engagements, www.RealDepthOfFieldWeddings.com. It all started when me and my wife decided to register to a popular wedding community www.Theknot.com. This was about 7 months ago (March 2011) and we felt it was time to seriously pursue weddings. What we didn’t know was that we weren’t necessarily prepared. Equipment wise we definitely were prepared but it was more the logistics of it all. When registering with a place like The Knot you are assigned a representative, someone who knows the area in which you will potentially work in and this person will basically becomes your consultant of sorts. They get on the phone and ask you things like “why do you want to shoot weddings?”, “what attributes do you carry as a wedding photographer?”. These are parts of this process that I wasn’t really expecting. Like everything else I do on line, I thought that it was as simple as registering, creating a profile, paying and waiting for the fish to bite. Instead I found my self with a person who was very involved or wanted to be for the sake of making everything right. I liked that. Non the less we weren’t ready, she insisted viewing our current website at the time with us on the phone. She would describe her navigation through the site as we spoke. She was troubled that the weddings we had done at the time were buried amongst other non wedding events and that when the page opened it didn’t land on weddings. I didn’t want to turn RealDepthOfField.com into a wedding website, that wasn’t my intent when I 1st launched it 2 years ago. RealDepthOfField.com is a place to display the variety of work we do. RealDepthOfField.com is all about diversity. So you know, I’m not too comfortable with shifting the site towards weddings and this was frustrating. The consultant would say that all we needed to do was to land the website on a couple of wedding photos, and we’d be fine. I knew that wasn’t true. A part of her wanted us to succeed but a bigger part of her wanted the business we would bring via monthly payments to become tenants on her site. My interactions with her in the span of several days gave me insight into how serious wedding photography is. Brides dont like going to websites that promote other aspects of photography besides weddings. It shows that the photographer is not focused on weddings, and of course they would be right. Like I always do I learned. Theres nothing like making your self vulnerable in situations like this. Its the best time to learn, and keeps your ego out of it. I can always learn. And although we felt we were ready, I took the loss when I stuck my head under the water to see a very different world. After avoiding the consultants phone calls and emails (because of course they become these sales people turned debt collectors) I was ready to man up and I wrote her this email:

Hey Margaret, sorry I haven’t been able to answer/return your calls. After speaking with you, me and wife decided that we needed time to be more prepared to receive brides. I understand that its engagement season and the wedding season is upon us, but we wouldn’t commit to anything unless we felt prepared at a basic level. Speaking with you revealed that we obviously weren’t geared for weddings nor the brides. As of right now we are making efforts to have the basics in place so that we may begin to grow as wedding photographers. I assure you that you have not wasted your time and we do appreciate the time you have invested in us. The moment we feel ready we will call you directly, so that we may be a part of the knot through you. Thank you for everything, you will hear from us soon.

Merline Noerand & Claudio Abreu

I knew then that I would not be turning RealDepthOfField.com into a wedding website, but instead starting a whole new one. I didn’t jump on the project immediately. My stubbornness said, lets see what we can do this summer with out The Knot, and you know what we did? 1 wedding! Fine, lesson learned, and I ultimately knew that the price the The Knot would demand and the cost of maintaining a new website wouldn’t compare to the thousands we would be making per wedding. We were ready and I knew this for sure now. Once September rolled around and we had the summer behind us, I felt more comfortable working on the project knowing that wedding season was over. Now we have all winter to prepare for next spring and have absolutely no holes on our ship (I like doing things slow, thats how I find success). In September a recommendation sent a serious bride our way, and this was a great opportunity for us to access our resources when it came to quoting our brides. Before a typical quote for our brides would be no more then $500.00 (a joke), but with this bride, we went a little bit higher to $2,500. And although she didn’t book, I knew that it was time to launch the new site so that serious brides could take us seriously.
We officially launched www.RealDepthOfFieldWeddings.com On October 2nd 2011. It is now a sister website to www.RealDepthOfField.com We still plan on focusing on fashion, portraits, events and much more through RealDepthOfField.com but now we can leave the serious wedding stuff to RealdepthOfFieldWeddings.com

The landing page, background & logo of the new website: