Over the past few weeks I’ve been attending Vega School of Brand Leadership’s Wedding Photography course in Durban, South Africa. It’s likely that wedding photography is the most demanding of all photographic assignments. So it stands to reason that if one can learn to deliver excellent creative photographic work in the pressure cooker of a wedding environment, one can probably cope with any assignment outside a war zone.
The Vega Durban photography course has been an enjoyably fair mixture of business and photographic training. Those attending had an equally fair balance of skill and experience.
Course presenter, Georgie Gartrell, was dead right with his opening statement – that photography and in particular, wedding photography, is a competitive field and in order to be successful one needs to stand out from the crowd.
The week before the course started, I had been talking with a few photographers plying their trade in the KwaZulu–Natal Midlands Wedding Photo route. It’s big business in our part of the world, with a large number of wedding venues and suppliers all competing for a slice of the same wedding cake.
As a result, I did ask the important questions to a few of them though: “What do you do that is different? What sets your work apart?”
They are obviously daring questions to ask . . . and key questions that we all need to ask ourselves again and again regardless of our area of speciality or even business profession. What are we doing that is different? What sets us apart? What unique offerings can we bring to the local or international market?
Another observation gained through the course was that while my experiences in stock photography have been invaluable in terms of learning good photographic and technical skills, I’m wondering if creative skills have suffered under the hard rod of stringent quality control.
The Vega course has, if nothing else, been a catalyst for developing many ideas both creative and practical in order to offer something different.
Some pictures from the wedding course can be viewed on my blog here:
Durban Photographer Website - Wedding Course Pics
Your comment must be written in English.
We value all opinions and we will not censor or delete comments unless they come from fake accounts or contain spam, threats, false facts or vulgarity.