Our Vision Defines Our Difference
What Our Vision Statement Means For You
How Our Vision Defines Our Difference
How Our Vision Defines Our DifferenceMaybe your first thought is – wrong click, moving on. We are perfectly fine with that response. When you go to a restaurant you do not need to know how the food is made – you just want good food. So it is with photography. You do not care how the business is ran you just want good photography. While you do not want to think about it when you go out to eat there are standards that you really do want. In a restaurant these are things like the cleanliness in food preparation and the quality of the ingredients. That literal sick feeling in your stomach comes later when something is off. As a business we never want to miss our mission which would in turn provide that sick feeling. For that reason we have a vision for how we live out our business mission. This is all for those people who want a peek behind the curtain to see how our vision shapes the day to day to deliver as we planned and you wanted.
Vision statement:
Passion: Working with adventurous couples, vibrant lit, natural them.
People: Lovers of photography connecting to experience the enjoyment of life
Product: Use best products to display art and communicate your story
Profit: Retaining higher value than cost to provide the best experience
Productivity: Evolve efficiency to deliver quickly despite demand
Partners: Team with consistent high-end performers who display humility and a passion for excellence.
Process: Live to innovate rather than comparatively arrive.
Passion: Working with adventurous couples, vibrant lit, natural them.
We spent almost 2 years working to figure out what we were most passionate about. This exercise in brand development was difficult but transformative. What it produced for our couples is clarity around the end product and confidence in our delivery. We call this our passion because it is something we have this deep seated ‘gotta do it’ kind of emotion toward. To illustrate the natural you thing think of a lot of wedding receptions. When we are there as a guest we notice there is this time when the photographer checks out. It is a large chunk of time kind of check out. Maybe they contractually have a nap time but for us this is the prime time to get the candid moments.
We believe couples invited people to their wedding because they matter to them. We find it difficult to sit on our hands when these emotional candid moments pass so quickly and really help couples relive the day. This is just one example of the many. We go into detail about what we mean by a passion of working with adventurous couples, vibrantly lighting you, and bringing out the natural in the moment candid like you in the linked images below. To say it again having a brand means you get what you see us doing continually.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Adventurous Couples
Vibrantly Lit
Natural You
People: Lovers of photography connecting to experience the enjoyment of life
Do what you love in life. We love photography so we are all in on doing it. The reason why we love photography is because of the people. If you ever had that job where everyone hated coming to work, the day was full of people complaining, talking behind others back, and in which things felt like a revolving door you know how that can be a drag on your enjoyment of being there. We love wedding photography and the things related to it because of it being a high energy – high emotion kind of time in your life.
We connect well with that because that is at the core of who we are as a couple. We have had some people share with us that they have seen some photographers with good skill but were completely aloof socially, were rude, had the personality of a brick, or just made them feel crazy awkward. Personality and a connection will matter in a photographer. What this means for you is we come into these key moments in your life that could be potentially stressful and strive to add to the enjoyment, the energy, and overall experience.
Product: Use best products to display art and communicate your story
We live in a digital age when film photography is a niche rather than the norm. While product used to mean you got a stack of prints it should be expected that product means edited digital images. We see the leftovers of the film days with descriptions like ‘digital negatives’ and some people thinking we print all your photos.
The last 5 years we have only come across one person who did film and they nonetheless still scanned them in for digital copies. For years we have provided images on wooden image thumb drives. As computers are starting to not have USB ports and we book weddings years in advance many times we have moved away from those to online mediums. Since we give you the files to do whatever you want with them what we really mean by product is what you do with them. We offer the common things you can print on like paper and canvas but go beyond that to things like metal, wood, and acrylic.
What we mean by best is that we use the best vendors who deliver the most consistent output. To illustrate with acrylic blocks we use a vendor that costs 40% more to have that extra 1/4 inch thickness and correct coloring. Anyone who has ever gone to Walgreens to print paper prints know that it can come out different than what it looks like on your computer. It is that same kind of idea that we want to deliver artwork that tells your story. That is true throughout our process from how we shoot to who we go through to get you prints to display. What this means for you is we are seeking to get you images you can use to tell your story and display for your enjoyment.
Profit: Retaining higher value than cost to provide the best experience
We are full time photographers running a business that needs to pay the bills. Profit is therefore essential to being able to continue as true professional photographers. If you have been pricing shopping photography for any amount of time you will find a lot of variety in pricing, packaging, and photography. While you may put finding the right fit of a photographer above the price you likely do not write them a blank check. It can be assumed then that we all consider pricing in relation to the value it brings. Based on this here are some of the different categories of photographers:
- Under Market: You get what you pay for but you might be able to find a true deal. We consider that most everyone in this category is a newbie to the industry or at least the given market. They have either no idea what it costs to run a business, are not actually running a business, or rightly have priced themselves with more value than their cost to accelerate their business growth. Some photographers have literally written on their website that they are new but most will just show 2-3 weddings over 15-50 images on their website. To give a more personal example if you look to the right you will see that the work on our website only goes back to 2013. The reason for this is we are only showing Colorado relevant work and we moved to Colorado in 2013. When we did this we intentionally put our price lower even though we had 5 years experience at that point. So we are not saying that you should write this group off but rather know the price is such for a reason.
- At Market: We believe the majority of photographers fall in this category. We go into it in detail in our posting on the Colorado wedding market. The general idea is that because of the business competition, high taxes, and the devaluing of photography as everyone ‘is a photographer’ it is very difficult to be full time. What we are saying is at market is below what is needed to sustain professional photographers. That it is the industry norm not unique to Colorado and certainly something that has gotten more and more prevalent with everyone calling themselves a ‘photographer’ after getting a basic DSLR and a few lenses.
- Over Market: We would love to charge 7000 for a standard wedding. There are some doing this and keeping a full schedule which is more the exception rather than the norm. To do this you need to have some name recognition, reach to a broad audience that touches multiple markets to fill your schedule. This means you will travel. If you are not actually booking a full schedule in this category you have either on the path to retirement, just want to charge that much even if only a couple people book you, or you to think you have arrived and just think too highly of your work. It is within your right to charge whatever you charge for your services but there are only so many people paying over market prices. We would note however that often we see the under market level people jump suddenly to the over market people. The idea is that the starting price or package price is a sign of success to some photographers.
Value to Cost 101
Value is a subjective perception. We believe that unless you are a professional photographer you will not be as keen in differentiating value. This means that you need to offer more value to your couples than what your cost will dictate. We price ourselves across all 3 market segments with packaging that is valuable to our couples. So our wedding starting price will not have 3 hours coverage since most weddings are not 3 hours end to end. We avoid the pricing gimmicks, extras, add ons, up-charges, and other crazy things because it is not what we would want in an experience.
We have read reviews so many times when couples thought their paying X amount would equal a certain result. Regardless of the price you pay what you want in the end is exceeded expectations. While we strive to provide the best experience we also know we need to balance that with delivering higher value than cost. As we are intentionally priced low know that if you come asking more for less it will just communicate you are not seeing the value or just doing some price shopping.
Productivity: Evolve efficiency to deliver quickly despite demand
How can you charge less than your worth and still make enough to be full time? If you consider the restaurant industry you would conclude that most places do not fully prepare your meal from scratch once you order. The only way they could do that is to have low demand for the service but also more work. Some photographers brand themselves as boutique and only doing so much work per year. To us this means people do not want us enough for us to be full time. The idea is to be successful you must find ways to deliver the same end product, increase efficiency, and then deliver consistently despite demand. The answer of how you evolve efficiency is sometimes achieved in outsourcing image editing.
We think this can work for some but we actually find it slower than editing images in house. Some will hire people to shoot the implied ‘less important’ kind of shoots but then you lose control of the quality. In the end the general expectation most give and many couples have is that images are provided in weeks for an engagement and months later for a wedding. We believe this implies that the photographer must not be full time, must have to photoshop every photo cause they cannot shoot well, or truly just have too much demand. We historically deliver engagements and proposal images in days and weddings in a week or two. The benefit of our demand is that we have had to learn to shoot better, edit better, and have more efficient processes in our photography ‘kitchen’. This is a continually evolving thing for us as we have not arrived and are not perfect in our backend processes. What this means for you is that you get your images quickly with a consistent output.
Partners: Team with consistent high-end performers who display humility and a passion for excellence.
Most everyone at some point will need to rely on others to supplement their weaknesses. If you are the lone wolf who does it all it is likely you will have gaps and deficiencies. This is what we love about being a husband – wife team. We balance each other out and have different skill sets and strengths we bring to the table. We realize though that we need to partner with others as needed. This is particularly helpful when a couple is looking for someone like a videographer or when our demand makes for wedding date unavailability. We firmly believe that we want to work with others that have our same key values to be high end performers with humility and excellence.
Our couples ask us for recommendations from time to time. We love to provide them but at the same time do not just recommend anyone. Life in general is filled with people who are full of themselves which produces a lack of excellence or an aloof stand offish manner about how they treat you. The people that are growing know they are not perfect but are working to improve continually. Those are the people we partner with as a business.
Process: Live to innovate rather than comparatively arrive.
Why does it matter if your photographer was featured on Style Me Pretty Cloudy? Does it matter if your photographer got the Couples Choice Award through Wedding Wire just like everyone else that paid for that service? What you likely care about is getting the best wedding photos for your wedding and engagement. Sure there are some couples who literally structure their wedding around the hope of getting in one of the popular blogs they follow.
You cannot help but think something is off however when you need to start designating weddings as “real”. Anyone can take a staged wedding day setup and make it look good. The wedding industry is full of this mentality that you have arrived if you have ________ . Sometimes what is filled in the blank is what you charge to the one person willing to pay it, the blog you got on because you edited for the blog’s color palette, or the award that no one really cares about. Even if it is a real award for a lot of good work in a contest we have seen some really pathetic things ‘win’ and other freakin amazing stuff get 15th place. This is the point – we believe when you compare yourselves to others you will only be as good as others.
Successful businesses take risks and think outside the box. Innovate or die is how life really is in the world. What this really means for you is we are continually striving to improve rather than merely copy. Sure there are things to learn from others but if we think we arrived because we got in Style Me Pretty Cloudy we may get focused on the wrong thing.