Why I Quit Wedding Photography for Smash Cake Photo Shoots
Why I Quit Weddings & Shoot Smash Cake Photography Instead
Hello again everybody and thanks for stopping into TheSmashCake.com. In today's blog we are going to cover why I dropped weddings like a dirty diaper and went looking for a better use of my time.
As you can tell I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to weddings. It wasn't always there. One day after shooting several not so great weddings that chip just magically appeared and wouldn't go away. Now I would love to sit here and tell you war stories about those weddings because they’re entertaining as hell. But it simply wouldn't be fair to the people involved. And in all honesty, gossiping never does anyone's reputation any good. So in today's blog we're going to avoid going full tilt negative and simply focus on the logical reasons why I quit the world of weddings and exchanged it for smash cake photography.
The hours
Looking back on the several not-so-great weddings that I mentioned above I have to say that in retrospect maybe I was just exhausted. Maybe it was being that tired that made it just a little harder for me to emotionally digest the disrespect, the battles between family members, and the overall pressure cooker that is a wedding. Why was I worn down to the nub you ask? The hours. Those of you who shoot weddings you know that when you sign on for 8 hours worth of coverage you're really into the job for about 35 to 50 hours. That encompasses the consultation, the engagement shoot, the wedding, all the editing, blogging, ordering and you name it that goes along with delivering a wedding. If you shoot one or two weddings a year those hours really aren't a big deal but I guarantee that if you shoot enough weddings it becomes a grueling slog of a job and can really suck your will to live.
On the smash cake side of things we figured that at our studio each one of our projects consists of 10 man hours. Compare that to the 35 to 50 that you'll put into most weddings. A big reason for that huge discrepancy in hours is of course the fact that we only spend about an hour and a half on average shooting each smash cake session. This makes it very easy for us to get needed rest between jobs, schedule family events or even just be home for dinner on the day of a smash cake shoot. That last point leads me effortlessly to my next one.
Weddings can really impact your life
It honestly felt like I never saw my kids when I shot weddings. At our studio our busy season for portraits starts in early July and ends mid December. After that we had a few weeks of chill time with the kids and then we were right back at it with indoor winter weddings. But unlike senior portraits and family portraits that can be scheduled midweek, weddings are almost exclusively on weekends. Which meant that during the week our children would go to school and we would maybe we get a few hours with them in the evening. Then on weekends mom and dad were gone shooting weddings. This caused some very significant stress within our family and was a big reason why we started questioning whether or not weddings were right for us.
Smash cake photography on the other hand was generally something that was done late morning and midweek. I could go into the studio in the morning, photograph a smash cake session, do the cleanup and still be home in time to catch my son's baseball game. No more explaining to a tear-stained little face why daddy couldn't be there.
Weddings took a massive toll on my body
Shooting for 8 hours straight no matter what you're photographing is physically demanding. I don't care if you're 20 and are in better shape than Dwayne Johnson. lugging around a camera and an off camera flash for eight straight hours is going to take its toll on anyone. Not to mention chasing around the bride and groom all day like a meth-crazed paparazzi.
It takes time to recover from that kind of strenuous activity (even if meth isn’t involved.) As an example, when I was younger it took me at least 12 hours to recover from a wedding. Unfortunately time has moved on and it now takes me a full day (or two) to get off the couch after a wedding. Feeling myself slow down forced me to read the writing on the walls. If photography was going to be my long-term career I needed to stop punishing my body and find something I could do well into the next decade.
For me smash cake photography is that something. With my smash cake sessions I'm chasing around a toddler for about an hour and a half. Yes it's still physically demanding but it's not eight hours worth of physical abuse. Plus with all the time I'm saving not shooting weddings I can fight off the effects of aging by hitting the gym. You can't argue with finally having enough time to put yourself first.
Bridezillas & their families behaving poorly
When you tell anyone on the street that you're a wedding photographer the first thing they want to talk about is Bridezillas. This has become such a common part of weddings that it feels like some of the brides have meltdowns just because they think it's expected. The first time you see one of these meltdowns it's pretty easy to give your bride the benefit of the doubt. A wedding day consists of tight timelines, conflicting personalities, and the icing on the cake is the thousands upon thousands of dollars spent on the big day. With all of that at play, it's pretty easy to understand why somebody would get so stressed out that they go absolutely nuclear. But if you do enough weddings you'll start seeing people meltdown because they think it's expected. It's like watching low-budget reality TV but unfortunately instead of being on your couch you're smack-dab in the middle of it. After a few of these it really became impossible for me to just shine it on. Unfortunately it began to affect my opinion of not only weddings, but of people as a whole.
In contrast when I arrive at the studio for a smash cake session everybody is thrilled to be there. No one at my studio calls in sick on smash cake day because it's so much fun. As far as my clients are concerned they took the day off work so they can go play with their child. They couldn't be in a better mood! Yes, there are still some meltdowns but they are nothing a milk sippy and a few Goldfish crackers can't fix.
Nobody takes a smash cake photographer to court
If you go looking on the web you can find thousands of articles about wedding clients suing their photographer. As we mentioned above it takes thousands of dollars to create the perfect day and with that kind of money a play people take things very seriously. As an ex-wedding photographer I completely understand the client's side of things, and when photographers screw up I understand why lawyers need to get involved. But sometimes the photographer doesn't even need to make a mistake to have their clients threaten to sue them. I know photographers who have had their client use the threat of a lawsuit to weasel extra hours of wedding coverage, a better/ larger album and even a massive discount on the price that was agreed upon in the contract. My very last wedding client tried something similar to this and it immediately had me asking myself if the juice was worth the squeeze.
Now imagine If I arrive late to a smash cake session? Or if all of my cameras were to fail during a smash cake session? Maybe I accidentally forgot to backup my files and they all got deleted. NOBODY is going to take me to court or threaten to sue. Yes I would have to call the client and yes I would have to profusely apologize but at the end of the day I wouldn't need a lawyer. Worst case scenario we reshoot the session and the child gets a bit more sugar that week than they normally do.
The editing is so much easier
When you photograph a wedding you're chasing your bride and groom indoors, outdoors, under trees, basically all over hell and back. Each one of those locations has drastically different lighting conditions. Every different lighting situation calls for a different editing solution which takes a massive amount of time. Editing is part of the reason why each 8 hour wedding takes you 30 to 50 hours to deliver.
With smash cake photography most of the time you're shooting in one location. Maybe that location is in the studio or it maybe it’s in a local park but for the most part the lighting conditions never change. So when you put your images into Lightroom you can batch edit. You can make changes to one photo and then copy those changes and paste them on all the other photos. You would not believe how much time this method of editing saves you. The editing wasn't exactly the deciding factor when It came to whether or not we drop weddings, but it was an extremely nice bonus!
Dollars per hour
The way we ultimately decided to give up weddings without any guilt was by looking at the dollars per hour. When we were deciding whether or not to give up weddings I really felt like a quitter. I felt like I was being lazy and that I just needed to suck it up. Even asking if I should give up weddings brought up massive feelings of guilt and made me feel like a failure. Fortunately for me my wife reminded me that we are running a business and that logic not emotion is a better place to make business decisions from. She simply advised me to look at what we make on a wedding compared to the amount of man hours that go into delivering these projects. Her thinking was that if we make a better average dollar per hour doing something else then we will simply go do that. No guilt, no agonizing over this decision, just use logic to make the best business decision possible. It was an elegantly simple solution.
So in the end our average wedding took us 50 hours to deliver and unfortunately we only made $3,000 on our last wedding, giving us an average of $60 an hour. For our smash cake clients an average session takes 10 hours and I'm proud to say that our average sale is $2,200 per client. This gave us $220 per hour.
It was very clear to us where the dollar per hour was and after you add all of the other physical and mental rigors of wedding photography it was a very easy decision. We decided to drop weddings like a hot rock and never look back.
Let's wrap it up
Now I hope writing this blog did more than just provide me with a captive audience and a forum to vent my frustrations. I really hope that those of you on the fence about wedding photography use the dollar per hour method to help you make the best decision possible.
I also think it's fair to point out that there are a lot of wedding photographers out there that are making $10,000, $15,000 and even $20,000 or more per wedding. When you're putting those kinds of numbers on the board, the dollar per hour method is going to tell you you would be an absolute fool to ditch weddings. So don’t.
But, in my case all of the other factors like family stress and physical well-being played a huge part in my decision making process. But OMG five digits per wedding might be worth sucking it up. I would like to think that even if we were making $20,000 a wedding that I would put myself and my family first. In the end it comes down to each individual photographer and what you personally need to be happy. For me... happy came in the form of chubby little babies smashing cakes.
I hope today's blog helped and if you'd like to turn this into a polite conversation about the pros and cons photographing weddings I would be happy to hold up my end of the conversation in the comments section below.
Thanks for reading, have a great day,
- Daniel