Just as a quick bit of background before I get into this article – I (Adam) am incredibly passionate about finding the positive in the negative situations we often find ourselves in as creative people. I’ve made a podcast in the past about it called The Positive Creatives and before co-founding FedWed I wrote a periodic email newsletter for wedding photographers called superchARJ. You can find the back issues of both at https://supercharj.co if you fancy a read/listen. Anyway let’s get into this article…
Should you stop looking at wedding work on social media?
Speak to most wedding photographers and videographers and they’ll tell you they’re completely overwhelmed by social media in every sense. I’ll leave the overwhelm around posting for another day, but today I’m talking more about the overwhelm of consumption.
Yeah, of course, one option is to stop looking.
It’s a therapy of sorts – sticking the blinkers on.
But it’s not always the most practical, helpful or positive way to deal with the problem of over-stimulation or over-inspiration if that’s even a thing.
I want to talk to you about a way of reframing the problem in your mind, so you don’t have to unfollow everyone, and can actually use it to bring some fun back into your work and keep up the forward momentum towards a style all of your very own.
Social media doesn’t make the rules but it does make great suggestions
One of the things we often hear about at workshops and conferences is that one way to find your style as a wedding creative is to not look at other wedding work on social media.
And while we do understand this, we also… don’t. Because the wedding photo and video industry is a close knit industry. We actually, through FedWed, want to make it even more close knit, friendly and supportive.
So unfollowing each other, while it might potentially reduce or temporarily stop the wedding overwhelm that social media has been known to cause, it’s not very supportive of each other and it’s not really a longer term solution to the problem either.
So how about thinking of it another way.
Instead of looking at other people’s portfolios and feeling like you SHOULD be doing what they’re doing… instead just start looking at it like something you COULD be doing.
Suggestions instead of rules.
Awareness creates opportunities for experimentation
This is topical all year round. Right now it’s right at the beginning of the season here in the UK, so we’ve just gone through a winter when people needed to make new content but weren’t making new work so we’ve been told what’s in and what’s out for the year ahead, techniques we should be doing, techniques we shouldn’t be doing… Content for content’s sake.
But now the season has begun and we’ll be seeing each other’s new work every week and that can be quite triggering in itself especially as a lot of the people we follow we might not know them, but we look up to their work and often feel like we’re falling short.
So back to this COULD vs SHOULD thing…
It’s important to start by ignoring all the stuff that tells us what we SHOULDN’T be doing. Actively ignoring it. Anyone posting this is either posting it for clickbait or ego. Both bad.
And then start looking at everything else not as stuff we SHOULD be doing but as stuff we COULD be doing.
The great thing about this is that it brings experimentation and creativity back to the forefront of our creative work and our businesses.
It means we can start to look at everything as an opportunity to try new things. And to complete that good old fashioned cliche, yeah it means we’ll probably often start by failing at those new things, but then we learn, and we refine…
Or… and by the way this is just as powerful… sometimes we won’t like the new thing we try, so we’ll reject it. And that rejection will be invaluable in working towards a unique style for our work.
It’s good to see what your customers are seeing
I’ll go off on a slight tangent for a minute to just talk about why I don’t think unfollowing all your wedding friends is the best solution to this problem.
We are in the wedding industry, and unless you’re trying especially hard to be extra-niche with your work – which isn’t all that many of us, me included, it’s always helpful and sometimes invaluable to have a good awareness of what the industry as a whole looks like.
So by seeing what everyone else is creating, it gives you a good idea of what our customers and potential customers are seeing, because what they’re seeing often sets their expectations of us. And if we know loosely what their expectations are, then we have a chance for two things.
First of all it gives us the chance to choose to – or choose not to – make work that looks like what the rest of the market is producing.
And by the way, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with existing in the mass market and producing work that isn’t niche. We can’t all be niche, and feeling forced to go niche in your style can be a stress all of its own.
The middle market or whatever you want to call it is where the majority of the couples are. There’s absolutely no shame in being mass market in your style or approach. It’s also entirely ok to be more niche, and we’ll cover that in a future blog post.
Help your customers realise what you offer
The second thing being aware of the market gives us is the chance to tell our clients how we do it compared to maybe how other people are doing it. To set their expectations and help them understand our approaches.
By being aware of the market, it gives us the chance to educate them that not all photographers and filmmakers are the same and maybe we work in a slightly different way, and we can explain that to them either in our booking consultations or in the build up to their weddings after they’ve booked us.
But if you’re not paying attention to the market and have no awareness of it this can lead to your clients expecting things you weren’t expecting them to expect and that can cause tension from both sides!
Overall, as a service-based-art it’s just better to know what our clients expect, so we can communicate with them around those expectations.
What if you don’t want to use wedding social media as inspiration?
Overall I’m suggesting that you DO follow other wedding photo and video creatives, and to see their work as not something you need to live up to, but ideas that you can use to inspire your own work. I’ll talk in future about active vs passive consumption.
But another way to approach it is just to appreciate other peoples work for what it is. If you love something just love it, don’t analyse it or allow it to make you feel inferior.
Nobody is posting to make you feel bad about your work, and the vast majority of people aren’t even posting for you at all. They’re posting work to attract clients to them.
I bet Spielberg, Nolan, Tarantino, Scorcese and Waititi all watch each others movies and appreciate them without feeling like they all need to be like each other.
Picasso wouldn’t want to paint like Monet. And it would be a dull old world if he had just because Monet was getting more Insta likes!