The Complete Guide to Professional Wedding Photography: Creating a more profitable and fulfilling business [Hardcover]

Damien Lovegrove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2007

Have you ever wondered why some wedding photographers succeed, when many others fail? Why some prosper, while others struggle to make a profit? Or how some can retire young, while others can never afford to stop? In this book, Damien Lovegrove shares with you the secrets of fusing art with commerce and gives you the vital tools needed for great achievement.

This stunning guide by two exceptional wedding photographers at the top of their game is packed with over four hundred pictures all with their own tales to inspire and inform. It provides a simple yet profoundly powerful recipe for success, both for photographers just starting out and seasoned wedding pros alike.


* Discover how to master every aspect of photographing a wedding
* Develop your style, and learn new shooting techniques
* Understand how to read and use light quickly and effectively
* Get to grips with selling, marketing, postproduction and product design
* Improve your customer experience and increase your product value
* Manage your time and become a more effective photographer
* Learn financial mastery and how to avoid financial misery
* Fast track your career and unleash your potential


"This isn't just another professional guide, it's a blueprint for success. Becoming a wedding photographer is the easy part. What's difficult is joining the elite, the top wedding photographers who earn big money. Even then it's not enough to be a good photographer. You've got to be good at everything else, too. That's where this book comes in." Christopher Wordsworth, professional photographer, author and journalist.


"Damien Lovegrove is among a very few photographers who have a deep grasp of business concepts. He generously shares his proven business and photographic system with us - invaluable to both the aspiring and experienced professional photographer in the digital era. A must read."
Michael J. Marmur, MBA. President - Special Event Photography, Canada

Damien Lovegrove has created a highly respected, world class photography business. He learned his trade as a cameraman and lighting director at the BBC. In 1998 Damien teamed up with his wife Julie to launch Lovegrove Weddings. They took the industry by storm winning a string of major awards and have since photographed over 300 top weddings for clients around the world. Their extensive knowledge gained from these lucrative commissions is condensed into this valuable resource.

* Reveals all the secrets and systems required by wedding photographers to make a good profit
* Shows how these wedding photographers have chosen a few rules to consistently use, and explaines how everything follows from consitent choices and decisions. Invaluable reference for all aspiring wedding photographers
* 300 color and black and white images detailing the technical information of the shot

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you buy one wedding book, make it this one!" -- Amazon U.K. review, Sep 2007

"Best pro wedding photography book yet!" -- Amazon U.K. review, Sep 2007



"This is not just another technical how-to-shoot Weddings book-it's a blueprint for success."
-WPE Guide (2007) --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Focal Press (August 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0240808908
• ISBN-13: 978-0240808901
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 11.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great images, good text but layout lost a star., September 23, 2007

By 

David Asche "ATLDC9" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Professional Wedding Photography: Creating a more profitable and fulfilling business (Hardcover)

The book is well written, with good images, so why not 5 stars?

I read the book cover to cover and that is the problem it's not an easy read. They didn't know what this book was when they did the layout. It's set up as a coffee table book with lots of good images and lots of information on how the images were taken. This causes bad breaks in the text, they break in the middle of paragraphs, and even worse sentences. One sentence cuts in the middle for multiple pages of images then picks back up with the end of the sentence.

As for the information provided in the book, it's good but not really new. One issue I have is that some of the chapters feel forced. This book covers the business of wedding photography so it has a chapter on bookkeeping that can be summed up as find good software and a good accountant. I get it, he doesn't do his own bookwork, fine, skip the chapter and write about what you do.

The images are great, the text is nothing new but it is motivational and gives a good blueprint to follow for the business of wedding photography. Overall this is a good book and would have been 5 stars if they had shown the attention to detail in the layout of the book that they put into the images.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, in-depth resource for international photographers, January 8, 2008

By 

Grace Adair "Grace" (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Professional Wedding Photography: Creating a more profitable and fulfilling business (Hardcover)

As an emerging wedding photographer, I was seeking a definitive resource that provided good compositional examples, ideas for running the scheduling of a wedding day, advice about business management and customer service, and workflow. I found all this and much more in Damien Lovegrove's superb book.

Where other wedding photography books failed for me, this one stood out heads and shoulders above the rest. I found that this book (while demonstrating a distinct British flavour, given the high formality of many of the weddings photographed) still transcended international barriers, where everything became relevant for me even as an Australian photographer.

Damien Lovegrove has a clear, succinct and easy-to-read narrative style of writing. He offers solid examples of his fine work, technical information and the environmental context relating to how they were achieved, together with detailed information about how to manage a wedding day, post-wedding workflow, and developing your business for profit.

Mr Lovegrove doesn't bog the book down with explanations of basic photographic theory, nor does he spend too much time discussing the type of camera or flash you should be using. He jumps straight into the nitty-gritty of the issue, and assumes that the reader already has at least some experience with cameras and photography. If he ever produced a book with detailed lighting concepts and theory, photographers would have the perfect library for their career in just two books.

Mr Lovegrove is genuinely inspirational and explains that he too worked from the ground up, and that only through hard work and dedication was his ambition realised.

This book was absolutely fantastic and I know that I will be buying any of his future books, his DVDs and attending his seminars. Damien Lovegrove is truly a master in his field. This book, above any other non-technical resource you may be considering, is vital for any photographer serious about becoming great.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not so sure..., January 13, 2011

By 

Severn (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Professional Wedding Photography: Creating a more profitable and fulfilling business (Hardcover)

When I was looking for a wedding photography book this one kept popping up with it's good reviews; so after visiting his blog I decided to order it.
Since then I have read many other wedding and general photography blogs, and the more I researched the more dated and weak his book comes across.
Things start to look alarming to me now from the very beginning of the book. After leaving the BBC (as he seems to name drop so often) as a cameraman he puts himself in £40,000 debt for Hasselblad camera. Yes, £40,000. I am nervous to take advice from someone who thought he needed a £40,000 camera to start as a beginner in the wedding photography field. And I think he mostly uses a £2000 5D MKII now.
He seems to restrictively shoot entirely at f4, but then claims that it's his "style". In fact the camera setting he gives is not much help as it's just f4 and then whatever works at that setting - he might as well shoot in AV mode. Another one of his "styles" is not to include the sky - why? It seems to be a very forced and limiting "style". Almost all the couple shots are posed and because of it often look stiff. I think his best photo is the one on the cover. The rest seem to be from the 80-90s.
Another odd things is that he now boasts that he has a studio with 2 full time staff - one who works on photoshop mostly and the other just for sales. Take a look at Jasmine Star's business set-up and you can see how this girl makes a killing being business smart and naturally talented as a wedding photographer.
At one part he points out how in the old days (90s I think) he used to try and up-sale heavily to clients, which is hardly practiced now, but he then goes into detail over 2 or more pages about how this dated sales technique works. Thanks.
One starts to get the feeling that he somehow got a lucky break when he started out (in the 80s or early 90s I think) and has managed to ride that since. If he where to re-enter the wedding photography field today as an unknown, I think he would remain unknown. He seems to lack a natural artistic eye, however he does have some good technical capabilities.
I would also suggest having a look at his wedding photography on his site [...] to decide for yourself if his technique and "style" work for you.
Overall I find his book looking very old school and not up to date with the rising young wedding photographers out there who really understand branding and don't think it just means shooting at f4, and not including the sky, and labeling it the "Lovegrove style"!
2.5 stars.