Allow me a little rant this week!

I’ve really let my marketing slip this year as I’ve been working hard to launch and develop FedWed. I’ve shot my usual 25 weddings, and all have been edited and delivered speedily and I’ve given amazing service and I’m overall happy with my photos but I’ve not done much above and beyond that to help people find me. And now people aren’t finding me.

And that means I’m a little behind where I’d like to be for next year – I have 9 and my goal is usually to finish the year with 10-15.

My average booking price is up for next year quite a bit so it’s not all doom and gloom but I really like to shoot 20-25 weddings, for creative forward momentum as well as putting food on the table (I’m the sole earner in my house).

I’m not panicking, but it doesn’t feel good. If you’re feeling the same, and I know a lot of you are, then I’m right there with you.

I’ve got a working theory that those of us struggling the most are the ones who have the biggest creative egos, and those with less of a creative ego aren’t struggling as much because they’re maybe happy to do the things that those of us who do have a bit of an ego about our work might look down our noses at.

It’s a theory I’m still working on and I’ll share it with you if it goes anywhere! Worth thinking about though. I know I am!

Anyway, obviously like any of us when work is down the first media I look to is the dreaded social one. The land of ‘only reels work now’. Instagram, who once loved us but now treats us like dirt. And honestly it just makes me sigh a very deep and meaningful sigh.

I don’t want to “do social media” in the way that social media is done these days.

Partly because the thing I truly absolutely LOVE about photography is the stillness and the silence and also the fact that because of that stillness and that silence, a viewer attaches their own memory and meaning to a photo.

I don’t want to tamper with that by adding music and transitions or my face or my voice, or storytime captions, or click bait headlines. From the first day I started my photography career my goal is always that my photos speak for themselves and I don’t need to speak for them or add the narrative.

That’s so important to me.

It’s why I never got on with slideshows because two different songs can completely transform the feeling and meaning of a set of photos.

And I know… I know all we’re told by the experts is that grid posts of photos isn’t going to cut it on social media any more. And I hate that.

I will still post my work on Instagram, but it really got me thinking.

There no way in this world that social media is vital to the survival of a wedding photography business. And I’m determined to see if I can prove that to myself, while learning some stuff that I can also share with you and through FedWed.

So that’s my goal. To lose a little (maybe a lot) of the creative ego and explore all the other ways away from social media that I can get found and get bookings.

I’m not turning my back on social media, I will continue to experiment with it in ways that I’m comfortable, but I will not bend to the will of the algorithm. I’ll post my photos and hope like I’ve always done that every ripple counts in the theory of chaos.

Do your work and put it out into the world as I learned from the book “Steal Like an Artist” all those years ago.

So my little experiment starts here, and I really hope that it works because frankly I’ll fall out of love with photography as a business if the only way to do it is to fall into line, turn everything into lowest-common-denominator ‘content’ and compete in the worlds noisiest of noisy environments.

Say it ain’t so(cial).

Thanks for reading.

Adam

PS – I’ve only got a few tickets left for the FedWed Solberge Hall Shoot Day and I’d love you to consider joining us for it before they’re all gone! Check that out here.

PPS – Please tell me this attitude to social media doesn’t classify me as a ‘dinosaur’. I’m young goddammit.