Fun fact: We were one of the first photographers in the country to change our business to positively impact the environment. While we admit we still have some work to do to reduce our carbon footprint, we made huge decision way back in early 90’s that completely changed our photography business and became environmentally friendly before that was even a thing. Read on…
Ditch the Proofs
This was our brochure for the new way of delivering wedding portraits mere days after the wedding. No one else in the southeast, was doing anything like this. It was exciting and completely terrifying at the time, but this decision ensured that we were an in demand wedding photographer and we started booking weddings up to two years in advance.
Way back when we first opened our studio and began photographing weddings in 1991, printed paper proofs were the standard delivery process for newly wedded couples. It was expensive - and wasteful. It was typical to print about 150-200 small prints, place them in an album that was passed around throughout the family and then discarded. When you’re doing 50+ weddings per year, that is a lot of wasted chemicals and photo paper.
Enter Chris Norris, an entrepreneur who sent a letter touting his newly developed software that would revolutionize the wedding photography business, saving time and money and increasing sales. As the company CFO, the Production Manager/Actual Production Department and VP of Marketing (Bryan and I each wear a lot of hats), I was intrigued and set up an appointment.
Chris drove up in a van with his family, and looking back, I can’t believe we let him into the house with his giant computer case. He proceeded to hook up everything to our television and demonstrated how we could photograph a wedding, scan the negatives, and present a slideshow set to music to our blissful couples the weekend they returned from their honeymoon! And wait, there’s more! We could then immediately design an album on the television screen, showing the selected images in the album pages and then flip through the entire book so the couple could see what it would look like before placing their order. (I wish I had a photo of the television screen to share.)
Wow. We were blown away. We kept sitting there watching as Chris demonstrated each feature, wanting it, but realizing it had to be expensive. It was unprecedented. It was exciting. And yes, it was expensive. It was $14,000!
But we realized the value in this process and took out a loan instead of buying the new car we needed. I learned how to manually scan the images with a video editor and a contraption called a Fotovix. It was unwieldy and time consuming, but I was determined to make it work. I learned the DOS software and became pretty quick at creating an album so that the couple could see their choices immediately, weaving their love story into a visual slideshow that brought them to tears almost every time.
While most photographers took about a month to deliver paper proofs in an album, we were delivering a finished album in the same amount of time! More importantly, the couples took great pride in knowing they designed their own album (mostly) themselves. It was priceless. We became a very in-demand studio through word of mouth and began booking weddings up to two years in advance.
At the time, we didn’t even know what ‘carbon footprint’ meant, but we knew printing photos that were thrown in the trash was wasteful and unnecessary. We began using this digital process for our portrait clients, as well, and have never looked back.
Blayne