I just paid for my first wedding fair which will be in November. I've got some time to plan this out, but wanted to get some advice from the wedding pros here. What kind of equipment setup do you use? If you have any pictures of your booth, that would be awesome. I'm thinking of having a large flat screen tv with a looping slideshow of my best work, and then have some framed and gallery wraps of bridal portraits. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
We no-longer do wedding fayres here in our part of the UK as they stopped providing us with leads and bookings two years ago, but when we did our policy was the same as it is in the studio...show big to sell big.
Don't just rely on tech. Wedding photography is about creating beautiful images to be viewed in print...so make sure you have lots of large format wall displays, together with complete client albums to show your work...in print.
A slide-show on a big LCD display is always great for grabbing people's attention (and if you have music on your slide-show, you can always do a 'volume battle' with the video guy they will always put next to you!) but the pro's are separated from the wannabes by their obvious investment in high quality printed products.
Good luck. Hope they are more successful for you than they are for us here in the UK.
Nic Cleave wrote:
We no-longer do wedding fayres here in our part of the UK as they stopped providing us with leads and bookings two years ago, but when we did our policy was the same as it is in the studio...show big to sell big.
I've heard some photographers get a lot of business from these events, and some (like you) are not doing them because the return on investment wasn't there. I'm curious, why do you think you weren't getting bookings from them?
Thanks for the advice so far. I agree on show big, sell big... and being sort of 'old school' I like having large gallery prints and albums to look at and feel. I do know that in today's age of MTV where the average bride has the attention span of a gnat on a triple shot espresso rush... you have to grab their attention with a big display.
Ryan Britton,
to quote Crocodile Dundee... "That's not a knife....".... well, Britton, THAT is a booth exhibit!! Wow... that's my inspiration. I'm going to go check out the flooring stores, and get a vinyl flooring piece like that. Great ideas.
More questions... did you build the wall pieces? Very nicely done. That would get my attention walking through one of these fairs. Holy Cow... if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right.
RSpears wrote:
Ryan Britton,
to quote Crocodile Dundee... "That's not a knife....".... well, Britton, THAT is a booth exhibit!! Wow... that's my inspiration. I'm going to go check out the flooring stores, and get a vinyl flooring piece like that. Great ideas.
More questions... did you build the wall pieces? Very nicely done. That would get my attention walking through one of these fairs. Holy Cow... if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right.
Yep. The wall pieces are just 4' x 8' panels of 2x4s and gypsum board. The board is glued and screwed onto the frame for durability. The angled wings are for stability.
Flooring is just some vinyl from Home Depot. It's a 10' x 20' booth and the flooring extends 2' out further to make the booth seem larger than it is. Our show is bare concrete otherwise, so they don't care if flooring sticks out.
It takes us about 3 hours to set up and about a third of that to tear down.
