If you’re not one to grab the ball and run down the field, it’s likely any amount of coaching will help.
Why? Unless you have an unrelenting drive and desire for success, it won’t help.
Let me break this down some more for you. There are basically three areas where you could get coached. Here they are:
1-Lighting & Composition
2-Marketing & Business
3-Inspiration & Motivation
Lighting and coaching…well, really? Have you searched You Tube lately?
Marketing and business…again, some rain on your parade….read the previous line.
Ok, let me rain on your parade some more. Here’s an ugly truth in the wedding industry if you’re marketing and/or being coached as a wedding photographer: ‘Your efforts are not being optimized because your market is shrinking.’
Don’t believe me? Grab a group of millenials and ask them about marriage. ewwwww seems to be a common response.
Or, who wants a ‘big fat wedding that costs tens of thousands of dollars?’
People are not getting married the way they used to. And many simply just live together. However, second marriages are on the rise.
It’s time to pivot. Pivoting means you change the way you market your product in a changing industry. Same market, new products. Stay with me on this one.
This works best if you can see into the future.
Some markets age out. No one really wants them any more. When cars got invented the horse and horse buggy whip markets changed.
The wedding industry may not go through extremes changes like that market, or, they might.
Some markets go away, gone, poof.
Some markets evolve. Like main frame computers evolved to home/business computers to smart phones.
Same market, new product.
The one who ‘pivots’ is the one who sees into the future. Same market, different product.
For my wife and I, we pivoted from child portraits to fairy portraits. We literally market in a vacuum, many sales, little sales resistance. This may change in time. Who knows.
My eye is on the ball all the time.
We also pivoted in the wedding industry. In the last two years we evolved into pop up weddings. My wife is a legal wedding officiant now, and I a decades-of-wedding-photographer who loves planning events.
Our combined forces complimented our efforts.
And the math doesn’t lie. It’s working out. I have no idea exactly how this will evolve, but my eyes are on the ball. And we’re cashing in.
So, I don’t care how good your photography, lighting, composition and marketing is.
If the market isn’t there, your shooting arrows blindly into the dark, cold night.
Good luck with that.
So, back to my original question. Do you really need photography coaching?
If it helps you understand and cash-in, sure. Why not. Otherwise, I’d avoid much of it.
I will expand on this more, and I, and my wife Tina, will dig deep, deep, into our experiences in the last two years as we ‘pivoted’ from large scale, full service wedding photographers to creators and planners in our newest area, Pop Up Wedding.
Note: this event is for members only. If you are already a paid member of nobsphotosuccess, and haven’t switched over to our new payment method, Patreon, now is the time.
Yours,
Robert N. Provencher – Your Master Coach Marketer
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