Category: Musings

Your marriage isn’t special

I was talking with a bunch of wedding photographers recently (we hang out in packs, yes) about this post I've been meaning to write but wasn't sure it would be well-received.  They encouraged me to go for it (because they want to see my business go down in flames?) so here I am.  You're going to have to hang with me for a paragraph or two - don't leave on "your marriage isn't special" - let me get to why on earth I would say this to engaged people. [A note before I go: I want to say that I don’t consider “marriage” a very different thing than “exclusive for-life commitment.”  I know some people either don’t want to or are prevented from legally marrying.  But love is still the same.] So, then, your marriage isn't special.  I think my generation and maybe some other generations that I'm not as familiar with, grew up with this idea that we are all unique little snowflakes.  We march to the beat of our own drum; we are so different from everyone.  Who could understand the uniqueness that is me?  So when we think about our weddings and our marriages, we have this tendency to believe our love is special, our love is different.  And somehow we revert back to being teenagers trying to convince our mothers that they couldn't possibly understand how it feels. I'm happy to say I think all this is bullshit.  Your love and your marriage and your wedding aren’t special.  It's a whole heck of a lot like the wedding before it and your friend's marriage and your grandparents' love.  And I find this thought incredibly comforting.  It's comforting to me to know that what I have with my husband - that amazing feeling of being simultaneously safe and unbounded - is something most people can and do experience.  It's comforting to me that most marriages get hung up on the same things - sex, money, children.  It's comforting to me that millions of people have been there and they made it just fine. And it gets better.  Because your marriage isn’t special, your love is pretty ordinary, really, it means you can talk to almost anyone for advice.  You can ask your mother how on earth are you supposed to deal with X.  You can ask your grandfather what he did when Y came up.  Or you could ask a random person on the street.  There’s not some magic formula to your love – anyone can understand – and this brings us all together.  It also means there’s no bottleneck in your relationship.  If you have this extra-special marriage that is based on some combination of factors others don’t possess, what happens when those things go away?  It’s very comforting to me to know that love grows and it has its own trajectory and that trajectory is remarkably similar across ages, places and cultures. This is solidified for me with arranged marriages.  Yes, some of the weddings I've photographed have been marriages where the bride and groom didn't have a great deal of say in who they married.  Their parents chose for them.  Most of my readers, Western readers, will find this thought abhorrent.  How could anyone possibly decide something so important for me!  But hear this - don't our parents know us better than anyone else on the planet?  Hear this too.  Some researchers in India did a study with couples that chose their partners and others that did not.  Then they polled them on marriage satisfaction.  For the first few years, the couples who chose their partners were happier, on average.  But those numbers flipped as the years passed.  The arranged couples reported greater love, happiness and life satisfaction.  There are tons and tons of factors here, but maybe it's because our parents would be very good at choosing someone who is going to be compatible with us long-term. And the great revelation for me is that here’s a couple starting from square one in the love game and, in time, they’ll come to be no different from any of the guests that have come to celebrate their wedding.  At the wedding of an arranged marriage, many of the guests had their marriages arranged as well.  I don’t see unhappy, grumpy aunts, uncles, grandparents gathered around.  I see the same love, devotion and joy that I find in Western weddings – of course I do!  Because arranged marriages, and marriages like mine and marriages between high school sweethearts and marriages with huge age differences, and marriages uniting different cultures – they all are more or less the same.  It’s the beauty of knowing no matter where you start, you’re headed to the land of hanging-out-with-one-person-all-the-time.  Your love isn’t special.  Your love is just like everyone else’s love. I trust in the institution of marriage, in the system.  My marriage isn't special.  There's nothing so great about what George and I have.  It's just as great as what other people have.  And that is really wonderful.  Because if we fight, we haven't destroyed some magical, unintelligible thing.  If we fight, it's because married people sometimes fight.  And married people normally make up and go on with the loving thing.  I believe that we are all mostly the same.  And if it worked for my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and millions of arranged marriages, then why shouldn't it work for me? My marriage isn't special and that means I can relax and just go with the flow, trusting that it will work for me too. [And some more notes: I am an unrepentant optimist but yes, I realize there are unhappy marriages, marriages that end in divorce, abusive relationships, downright unhappy people.  Not every marriage is perfect, no.  Some people shouldn’t be married to each other.  Some people shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place.  I’m two years into my marriage and 100% unqualified to speak to divorce.  But I will say this: many of the divorced people I know remarried and have been with their current spouses for longer than they were with their first spouse.  The second time around they were a lot better at picking a mate.  Maybe they knew themselves better and knew what they needed in a partner.  In either case, they still trusted in love and in the system, enough to give it another go.]
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by Amber Categories: MusingsTags:

Big picture vs. detail-oriented and how it relates to photography

Most of the people who read this blog are around my age, so it's likely you have been job hunting on Craigslist.  When I was doing it, I was mostly looking for administrative stuff because it's where my skill-set was when I left college.  Who could really do much besides use a computer, read, write and type?  Pretty much every listing wanted someone "detail-oriented."  Because they said they wanted it, I said I was it, even though I had this strong nagging suspicion that I really wasn't even remotely detail-oriented. A few years have passed and a conversation on a photo forum recently helped me solidify to myself that I am completely not detail-oriented.  I am a "big picture visionary" type.  This makes so much sense to me.  I have a hard time discussing nitty-gritty details and normally figure all of that will work itself out in the end.  I want to talk about how something will feel, the overall idea.  I always want to talk about things from 30,000 feet up and don't have a hard time getting perspective about most stuff.  It's when we start talking RAW vs. JPEG or Sigma 50 1.4 vs. Nikon 50 1.4 or navy blue tablecloths vs. indigo tablecloths - who cares?!  Let's just do something.  My gear-loving friends flip out about this stuff and I really couldn't care less.  I have some lenses and they super work and I'm very happy with them.  I don't need or want any more.  In fact, the less stuff I have to carry around, the better.  Shock and awe from the gearheads!  But for me, it's about the big picture - can I capture this day in an authentic, candid, joyful, artistic way? This totally relates to photography and I'm getting there!  Now I'm going to show you images with mistakes.  And I'm going to tell you about the mistakes!  Why?  Because I want you to know the type of photographer I am.  All photographers make mistakes - we're people, after all.  But I like to think that my mistakes are about details, while I'm pursuing the big picture.  One of the biggest things I struggled with learning photography was how to get "clean" backgrounds.  When you're photographing someone, you have to move yourself so that they are not in front of something distracting - like a big red sign, etc.  This is something I struggled with, because I was focusing on getting the right moment.  Actually, getting the right moment is still my focus, but I've trained myself to get the other stuff right too (well, mostly, as we'll see!) This post is precipitated by an incredible sponsored post on A Practical Wedding.  I paid for it, it's advertising, but I still get all giddy when I read it - it's so me!  I love APW and if you are vibing on what I'm saying, you should check them out and you will love them too.  Meg, who owns the site and writes all the sponsored posts, linked to Megan and Pritpal's Sikh/Christian wedding.  And at the very bottom there is the ring shot I did... and one of the rings is upside-down. ring shot on indian scarf Whoops!  But here's the thing: I did this ring shot in - oh - 30 seconds?  Because there was lots of other good stuff going on I didn't want to miss.  Like this: groom helping bride with sari It may be possible to be equally good at both, but I must admit I still sometimes skip the "details" in favor of the moment, the reaction, the emotion.  I have learned to go with my big-picture tendencies and let the details iron themselves out.  Sometimes there's an exit sign in my photos, sometimes I chop off a bit of a hand or shoe.  But if I do, it's because I'm trying to get this: great falls engagement session Or this: wedding exit with bubbles Or this: bridesmaids help with bride's sash Or this: camp puhtok wedding reception camp puhtok wedding That image above is one of my favorites from Aimee & Richard's wedding at Camp Puh'tok. Aimee and Richard are coming into their cocktail hour from our portrait session after their ceremony and here are some of their guests and parents oohing and aahing over them.  I'm in love with this image.  But there's something wrong with it and I know what it is.  I didn't quite get enough of Aimee in the frame (there she is on the left).  So when I show it to potential clients or blogs or whoever, they don't quite get it.  And I haven't discussed this particular image with Aimee, but I have to think she loves it as much as I do - who wouldn't?  Here's a whole bunch of their guests absolutely beaming with pride.  Yeah, so it's not a perfectly-composed image.  But if I had focused on the detail of getting enough of Aimee in the shot to cue everyone that here are the bride and groom coming into their party, I might have missed everyone's initial reaction.  Aimee and Richard know what this image is about, so who cares if outsiders don't quite see it? The image on the right I know Aimee likes because she made it her profile pic on Facebook (yes, we photographers notice these things and sometimes flip out if our clients don't use our photos for their FB profile).  But I'm cropping Aimee too tight on the right.  It's a mistake but is it a mistake anyone is going to care about?  Maybe some photo judge but I doubt my clients will care. And that brings me to my final point!  My clients and, really, any wedding photographer's clients, are normal people, not photo critics.  Some photographers are concerned about blogs, about magazines, about images that will win at judgings.  I'm not gonna lie and say I don't care about that stuff.  It's lovely to win at photo judging competitions.  But my primary concern is to get my clients images that are going to fill them with joy, images that bring them back to their wedding day.  And in my mind, they don't have to be perfect.  They just have to feel right.  Because I can't promise perfection - I'm not detail-oriented.  But I can promise to focus on what I think is important - emotions, moments, glee.  And that probably means there are going to be a few upside-down rings.  
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by Amber Categories: Musings

“Personality-based marketing”, kick-ass clients and why high school was so miserable

So I've just come back from a sumptuous cheese feast with some clients (hi guys!), where I really couldn't mesh better with a couple.  These people get me and I'm pretty sure I get them.  And I thought maybe it was time to muse a bit on "personality-based marketing" and how it's so great not just for my business but for me as a regular old person who sometimes feels brash or awkward or unappreciated. I'll start in high school.  I went to a really big high school in the (way way far out) suburbs of San Francisco.  There were 700 people in my graduating class and something like 4,000 in the school - it was ginormous.  But I always felt sorta alone.  I had a few close friends but I wasn't invited to the parties where all the cool kids were getting drunk and hooking up and all that.  I didn't have a boyfriend until senior year (and only then because I didn't have anyone to take me to prom - he was my prom date before he was my boyfriend).  I just didn't feel that anyone understood, much less appreciated, my particular brand of weird.  It makes sense to me now, but at the time it was obviously pretty disturbing.  I more or less hated high school. And in college, things got better.  There were more nerds and being smart was actually seen as a good thing.  It was easier to find my people.  Though there were still a lot of folks around who I didn't jive with, it was relatively easy to find someone who got my sense of humor, appreciated my honesty, didn't care that I don't own a stick of makeup. In the real world here, it's sort of back to high school.  The world is full of people who don't get me and who I don't really get along with that great.  I don't have social issues or anything (I don't think so!), it's just that the world isn't full of best friends.  Lots of nice people, I just don't click with most folks. I have to hunt them out. And that's where "personality-based marketing" comes in.  Like about a million other wedding photographers out there, I have been heavily influenced by Jasmine Star, who does the photo thing and all but really excels at the business side.  (Yeah, don't even bother, she costs like $15k or something.)  Jasmine Star is all about attracting the right clients and repelling the wrong clients.  So, for instance, because we're talking weddings here, a lot of people might be tempted to use really generic romantic language like this: "On your special day, I will capture the beautiful emotions between you and your partner as you commit to each other forever."  Barf!  Here's how I would say it: "I'll photograph the shit out of whatever happens on your wedding day." Plenty of people - tons of people, are going to read that sentence and click right off my website.  I said shit, I was irreverent about the "most important day of their lives", etc.  But some tiny portion of people looking for a wedding photographer are going to read that and think "yeah, that's exactly what I want my wedding photographer to do."  And right there, in that teeny fraction of people looking for a wedding photographer, I find my couples.  And it's how "personality-based marketing" (that is, marketing on which I make a point of telling people who and how I am, rather than trying to appeal to the masses) draws in the incredibly awesome people who hire me. Because here's how it goes.  I've got this website.  And I talk a lot of shit up in here.  And that turns off tons of people and they go away because they hate me.  But a handful of people actually dig me.  And then they write me.  And then I meet them and they give me money and I photograph their wedding.  Because there are only so many weekends in a year and only so many weddings I can photograph without losing it physically and mentally, I don't need thousands of clients - just a couple dozen or so each year.  Therefore I don't have to attract the masses - I can appeal to the sliver of people that are going to think I'm funny (y'all think I'm funny, right?). And all my clients are AWESOME because of this process.  Which brings me to my very last point, after a very long post. What does this have to do with high school?  Well, in high school I was miserable because I felt alone.  Having a business based on my own personality (and, you know, some photos and stuff) draws in people who are like me or at the very least think I'm pretty ok.  This means that almost every single person that writes me is going to be the kind of person I would want as a friend.  I really can't emphasize how validating this is, personally.  I put myself out there on the web, and people write me almost daily to tell me they like my vibe and want to meet me.  It's given me so much confidence about who I am. So in sum, I want to publicly thank all my amazing, kick-ass couples.  You know who I am and you still want to hang out with me on your freakin' wedding day.  That's pretty great.
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by Amber Categories: Musings