The Life of a Wedding Photographer

For those of you that follow our blog regularly, you will have noticed that we are a little bit behind in our blogging. In fact, we're 4 weddings behind right now.

Why is that?

Well, as self employed business people, Steve and I place certain deadlines on ourselves. And one of those deadlines is how long it takes to get your proofs to you. The thing is, we have photographed 20 weddings in the past 4 months. I know that averages out to just about one per weekend, but we have had weekends where we have done up to 4 weddings. In addition, this is the time of year that all publilcation deadlines for the magazines we work with come up. And we have three commercial clients whose websites we are launching in the next two weeks.

So, I wanted to give you all an idea of an average day at Tying the Knot. Steve and I have very distinct duties within our company, and we each put in 8 - 10 hour days. This is what I did last Wednesday:

7:00 Wake up and put on coffee.
7:05 Turn on the computer and start checking email.
7:10 Steve brings me coffee
7:30 Get breakfast for the kids
8:00 Get the kids dressed while all email is being sent.
8:25 Leave to take kids to school (they don't go to the same school right now, so we have to go to two different places).
8:30 Steve starts work on the computer.
9:40 Back home - answer more email.
Proof edit one wedding. Batch into 4x6 images for processing.
Start doing the photo edit for a commercial client's website launch.
While running the batch, send out three contracts for 2007 clients.
Answer more email.
Start the laundry.
11:45 Make lunch - eat at my desk while organizing files for an album design.
12:00 Batch the next wedding and start the edit.
While the batch is running in the background, edit high res files for portrait order.
1:30 Run errands.
2:30 Pick the kids up at school.
3:00 Make snacks, do some household chores.
3:15 Check email while the boys play outside
Continue to edit the second wedding.
4:30 Make another snack and get Logan ready for his after school activities.
5:00 Leave for Logan's kickboxing class.
6:30 Home from kickboxing - make dinner if its not already done.
Get the boys into the bath.
Play/Book time before bed.
7:00 Leave for a meeting at Ethan's school.
10:00 Home again - check and answer email that came in since 5:00.
11:00 Bed.

We do this very same routine (with a few variations) Monday - Friday. We usually have a wedding on Saturday.

When I write it all out like this, we look pretty busy. And we are. But the thing is that we are busy because we choose to be busy, we choose to keep the responsibility of raising our kids to ourselves and we choose to run the business ourselves. We like to be busy and we like to keep our personal touch in every aspect of our business. Everything that you get from Tying the Knot is personally worked on by Steve and myself. Everything.

So, the blog is a bit behind, but that's ok. Our clients are all receiving their proofs in the next few weeks, the orders for Chirstmas are starting to come in and we have 9 album designs to send out for approval. The blog will be caught up as soon as we finish all that!