Note: Photographers’ Friday is a weekly blog series directed toward professional photographers, and in some instances, serious amateur photographers. All Photographers’ Friday blog posts will assume that readers have a basic working knowledge of digital SLR cameras, but if you’re left with questions or don’t understand any of the information, don’t hesitate to ask. We love e-mails!

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I’m going to be painfully honest and do a little soul-baring today.

Lately, I’ve been hearing more frustration than usual from some of my fellow photographers from all over the country. Right now, there are a lot of people losing out on potential clients — who seem to love them — to cheaper photographers. Of course it happens. There are a ton of photographers in business, in case you hadn’t noticed. And there are a ton of photographers who charge such low prices that they cannot run their businesses sustainably. Meaning that, while they might be booking clients at a decent clip, they won’t have enough money to upgrade their gear when an older camera fails, or they won’t actually see enough profit from their hours and hours of hard work for photography to ever be more than a second job for them. They might never see any profit at all. But that’s cold comfort for photographers who are priced to run a sustainable business, yet keep hearing from prospective clients, “We’ve decided to go with someone who can give us a better deal.”

I could go on and on and wax poetic about how “you want clients who will value your work more than getting a discount,” or encourage photographers to remember that “they just weren’t your ideal clients.” Chances are, it’s true. However, the inverse is also true.

You weren’t the right photographer for them.As someone who has most certainly been there, done that, I’ll be the first to admit that it hurts. It stings like lemon juice in a paper cut and it aches like an upset stomach. It burns to listen to a bride cry as she tells you she can’t afford you after you’ve fallen in love with her and her fiance and she’s clearly fallen just as in love with you and your photography. It’s a blow to your pride to be told that a couple has decided they’ll be more comfortable with a photographer who has as many years of professional experience as you have years on earth — after they’ve gushed and gushed over your work. It’s frustrating when a couple you’ve been corresponding with comes back to say they’ve decided to have a friend shoot their wedding for free instead of hiring a professional at all.

Each of those scenarios has happened in the time we’ve been in business. So have dozens and dozens of others like them. And whether or not I thought any of these clients were my ideal couples, the fact of the matter is that they decided I was not their ideal photographer.

Which means that — regardless of whether they ended up with photographs they treasure or photographs that disappointed them — I really wasn’t the right photographer for them. However, that means the inverse is also true.

They really weren’t the right clients for me.Circular logic? Perhaps. Yet it’s logic all the same. Two pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together aren’t “wrong” because they don’t fit. They just don’t fit.

I am grateful that I can honestly say that I have never worked with a couple whose wedding I didn’t feel meant to shoot. Every single one of my couples has made it clear that they hired Danny and me because they wanted us, because they trusted us, and because they believed that we shared their vision for their wedding and their love story. Of course, every photographer wants to work with clients who feel that way!

And every client wants to work with a photographer about whom they feel that way.

So yes, it hurts our psyches when we get passed over by prospective client after prospective client who says they are looking for a lower price and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re worth our rates. Yes, sometimes it hurts our bottom lines, too — this is how we make the money that pays our bills, after all. But we can’t look at the clients who choose not to hire us as the proverbial “ones that got away.” Even if we could have served them better than anyone else, and even if we could have produced the greatest photographs in the history of photography, they’re the ones who would have spent the time leading up to their shoots fretting over the amount of money they’d just forked over for some pictures. They’re the ones who would feel stressed out over their decision, wondering if they’d chosen the right photographer.

Here’s the thing, and I’ve told this to prospective clients before: Clients have to implicitly trust their photographer in order for the photographer to produce her best work. Not only will the client be tense and uptight during the shoot if there’s a lack of trust, but the photographer will feed off that negativity and struggle to make the client look as happy, beautiful, and relaxed as other clients who have entirely trusted the photographer. It’s essential to me that my clients trust me. So essential that I even cancelled a wedding contract early this year when it became obvious that the couple wasn’t secure with their choice to book me.

We weren’t the right photographer and client for each other.I don’t ever want to be a source of stress for my clients, and I don’t want them to be a source of stress for me. It would be better to forego the booking than agonize to convince a couple after the fact that booking me was the right thing. I sincerely hope that the couples who’ve booked another photographer to save a few hundred dollars have been thrilled with their decision, and with their results. Even when their wedding was on a date I wanted to fill, or at a venue where I’d love to shoot, or if they seemed like an incredibly fun couple, I simply wish them the very best.

Then I move on and turn my focus to the couples who know that I am, without a doubt, the photographer they want. I’m in business for them, after all — not for the ones who walk away.

~ Laura