Love Us (Please)

After chatting many times with local photographer friends I’ve come to the realization that they think I’m crazy. You might be wondering to yourself why I would open this blog entry with such a blatantly, informal, self-degrading line. Well, that’s a good question.

I have been thinking a lot lately about why we do things the way we do, and how Joshua Rainey Photography differs from other photographers, especially when it comes to weddings. I pride myself in working really hard and running my business in a way that directly benefits my clients by putting them first, and myself second. This may go back to my beliefs, or the way that Rachel and I live our lives, or maybe it’s just us wanting to have incredible customer service in an industry that all too often takes clients for granted. Who knows. What I do know, however, is that plenty of our competitors think we’re crazy for doing things the way we do. Here is how we differ from our colleagues…

Two Week Turnaround Time:
Let’s make this official, now, eh? We shoot a lot of weddings each year, but we have some guidelines we abide by to make sure we don’t take on more work than we can handle. If we can’t get a wedding edited and delivered to our clients within two weeks, we won’t take it on. Often times this results in us booking only one wedding per weekend. That gives us the entire week to work on editing and finishing the behind the scenes work for the wedding we just shot. We have always done our best, and in 99% of circumstances succeeded to deliver wedding images to our clients within two weeks of their wedding date. Now, we’re making that a guarantee. If your hard drive of digital images is not sent out on the first business day following the two week mark of your wedding date, we will give you a $150 print credit. That’s how confident we are about this. Many of the other photographers we talk to don’t get images back to their clients for 2-4 months! Some, even 6 months. That’s ridiculous, honestly. If you consider another photographer, please ask them what their image turnaround time is and whether or not they have a guarantee. That brings me to my next point.

Harddrives:
Yes, we give you your digital images on a hard drive. Why? Because we shoot so many darn images and we keep them at full resolution for you. So, that means that you can make huge, crystal clear prints with the digital images we give you. Other photographers downsize images to make them fit onto a disc, or delete images to get them below a certain number or size, and then there’s some photographers out there that don’t even give you the images after the wedding. We give you every image we feel has or could have meaning to you. Many of our clients get 1000+ images as part of their final product. Yes, I agree with my competitors, that is crazy, and it’s a lot of work for us! But, our clients are worth it and they’ve shown us and told us time and again that they love the huge number of images they get from us.

Custom Pricing Structure:
We have always felt that our client’s needs out-weigh any pricing structure we could come up with. So, we made everything completely custom. Our pricing menu is more a list of services and products than a list of packages. In fact, there are no packages or collections at all. We give you a breakdown of every service, album, print, product, or session that we offer and list the prices plain and simple next to each. Then, our clients choose exactly what they need and build their own package. We also offer clearly laid out discounts for clients that want to bundle multiple items together to get a package deal. And to top it all off, we offer discounts for weekday and/or off-season wedding dates.

Point being, we want to do everything possible to make our service the best for our clients. That’s not always an easy thing, and many times it requires more work on our end. We will always strive to be innovative, clever, and unique in how we do things.

And, we love our fellow Oregon photographer colleagues! We have met so many great wedding photographers and great people in this industry, in the last few years especially. So if this blog post strikes a bad chord with you or gets you riled up, maybe you should look at the way you do things and ask yourself why. Maybe we can all work together to step this industry up and get images back to clients in reasonable periods of time. We should make sure our clients are not confined to the boxes we create for them. We should make sure our clients get exactly what they need. Cheers all!

– Joshua