Wedding Photographers Don't Understand Irony

Many wedding photographers moan that the market is being destroyed by the ease at which people can go out, buy a top of the range camera or two, a few lenses and go out with no training or experience and set themselves up as wedding photographers.

Many wedding photographers also move into the training market with no idea of how to set up a training workshop, how to write aims or objectives, how to question correctly, how to communicate effectively difficult concepts such as “Inverse Square Law” etc.  In short, the can use a camera but can’t train adults (kids are a totally different thing).

Why? Probably because many photographers think that as they are good photographers (they get a lot of Instagram likes, FB likes etc or win some regional award etc) they will make good photography trainers.

There is a huge difference in being a good / great / amazing / world class photographers (and I say that as having attended workshops from people in that last category) and being able to teach other people that skill to the extent they can go away and implement it immediately as opposed to being inspired to implement it and then don’t bother because they never really understood the concepts being explained in the first place. 

The irony is lost on photographers who moan about “Uncle Bob” types picking up a camera and setting themselves up as photographers whilst at the same time photographers start running training workshop with no more skill or experience in adult training than said, “Uncle Bob” has in photography.

Within the corporate T&D world, there is, in my opinion, a much better standard of training than the wedding photography world.

When working in the corporate world I’d never think of hiring someone who didn’t have a professional and/or formal training qualification and was expecting to be paid £1500 a day for the training they delivered. (The subject matter experience was a given by the way)

Yet in the wedding photography world, people are willing to fork out that much (and more) for attending a workshop by someone with no training experience, poor communication and no organisation or structure.  Looking around the Uk the average price for photography training seems to be around £350.  But again - great photographers but no training qualifications. 

Worse is that I’ve yet to attend a training workshop where any kind of feedback was requested so that the trainer could improve themselves etc, not any kind of evaluation to ensure that the money paid out would bring a return on investment to the attendees. #NoROIiswastedmoney

For what it’s worth I’m a successful wedding photographer and also a successful training specialist. I run various workshops on photography and a very successful Wedding Photography Workshop.