Denis Reggie Seminar - Reflections

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a wedding photography workshop run by Denis Reggie and organised by Queensbury. Denis Reggie is an American Wedding Photojournalist catering to the very upper end of the wedding market. His lesson was broken into 2 parts. The first focussed on business and the market while the second part focussed on how he achieves the look of his photos. Below is a video showing how he achieves his look for group photos. Be warned, it is part of an ad for pocket wizard.

Of the two parts of his talk the most enlightening part was the first part, the part that focussed on the market. Here he suggested that the market can be split into two main groups of couples (each with two subgroups)  and two groups of photographers. To put it simply, adn to pull from the video above, couples either want to be themselves and have their photographer capture things as they actually happen or they want the photographer to tell them what to do. Similarly photographers either shoot things as they happen or try to control and orchestrate events.

Denis suggests that those who want the photographer to capture things as they happen are better clients as they are more likely to be high spend clients. While this is almost certainly true in his experience it is worth noting that his experience is skewed in two important ways:
1) He is a high end photographer with a high end price tag
As such he attracts high end, big spend clients.
2) He is a photojournalist
As such he attracts clients who want  their day captured as it occurs without direction from the photographer.

Notice that I have separated these two things. What Denis Reggie seems to suggest is that these two things go hand in hand. While this is true for his clients we must remember that his clients come from a specific subset of the population. Essentially his viewpoint, with or without his knowledge of it, is effected by sampling error.

Don't believe me? In order for Denis Reggie's assertion to be true high end wedding photographers would ALL need to be photojournalists as photojournalists would be the only ones who could survive at this end of the scale. This is not true. There are plenty of high end wedding photographers who are not photojournalists and they are doing just fine.

What then is the take home message? The take home message is, perhaps, that there is a market for high-end wedding photojournalism.

Side notes, the students

The people attending the seminar seemed to struggle with Denis Reggie's ideas and approach in the first section of the course. The main difficulty seemed to stem from treating the ideas as a presentation of how Denis sees the world rather than a presentation detailing how the world is. Those who got stuck in this second version, thinking his words were describing how the world is, had difficulty reconciling their experience of the world with the description he was given. What they missed was that here we are describing two completely different world views, as such they are never going to align themselves with each other as they are fundamentally different.
Here's how they differ:
Geographic Region
Denis' client base is world wide. For may of us our client base is restricted to the area that we live in. With a world wide client base you maximise the number of potential clients. Most importantly you maximise the number of potential big spend clients. As long as you're covering your travel costs you're away laughing.
Target Market 
Denis targets people who fit his way of photographing weddings. Consciously or not we also target clients who fit out way of shooting weddings as clients come to us because they like what we do. If we are shooting in fundamentally different ways to Denis then the clients we attract will also be fundamentally different. Many of the students felt that because they had never encountered the sorts of clients that Denis was talking about it was impossible for these clients to exist at all. Once again sampling bias is shaping opinions. As an illustration the fact that I have never met a US Senator does not mean that US Senators do not exist.