Wedding Season 2021 Kicked My Butt
This year was a doozy. The photos I’m using in this blog probably don’t accurately represent the way I feel, but I think I can speak for all wedding vendors when I say that Wedding Season 2021 kicked everyone’s butt.
I have shot 30 weddings thus far, and I have 3 more to go. It’s bittersweet. Really, truly. Chasing brides has been my favorite thing to do for the last 9 years, but when COVID happened, I was forced to pivot. I turned 100% to studio photography and fell in love with that, too. So when we had to close shop in March 2020, I was depressed and went into panic mode. We opened back up in June and it was like a floodgate had been opened—I got so many bookings, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Because of all of the postponements that COVID caused in 2020, a lot of couples moved their weddings to 2021. So wedding photographers all over the world started scrambling to find second shooters. All of a sudden, my Honeybook and Facebook comments on Second Shooter posts were starting to work, and my calendar quickly started filling up. Before I knew it, I had booked more Second Shooting gigs than I had ever imagined possible. And I booked more of my own weddings than ever before, too. I didn’t take into consideration the fact that:
I’m 30 years old—I can’t shoot doubles like I used to. The back pain, the headaches, the foot pain, the fatigue… I need a full 24 hours of recovery after shooting just 1 wedding, let alone two in a row.
I now own a photography studio. I can’t be gone all the time.
If all of my weekends are reserved for weddings, and my weekdays are reserved for portraits, what time would I have to edit??
So yeah, I got myself into a little bit of trouble.
A lot of my followers watch my stories and probably assume I’m having the time of my life. Don’t get me wrong—I absolutely love my job. I think I have one of the most fulfilling careers ever. But sometimes I think that photography gets overlooked. People don’t realize the hard work that goes into it. They think photographers just push buttons and overcharge for their services and/or products. There is so much more to it than that.
Believe it or not, I am an introvert. But I have to come out of my shell for each of my clients, and I have to network with a lot of the vendors (and sometimes the wedding guests when they approach me) to get further in the industry. That’s actually one of the things I’m most grateful for!
Saturday’s wedding had the coolest photo booth I had ever seen, and I was able to make friends with the guy who built the booth. I have also met some of the most creative videographers in the Tri-State, ones who tell wedding stories as if they were movies. I learned a lot about Egyptian culture and fell in love with some of the songs I kept hearing at Arabic weddings, so much so that I added a few of them to my Apple Music Library.
Ya Habibi, Ya Habibi…
So yeah, Wedding Season 2021 kicked my butt for suurrreee. But I don’t regret it one single bit.
I won’t do it again, but I don’t regret it haha.
