Brides Magazine Recommended Photographer…Still

April 8th, 2010

This post is a fol­low up to my pre­vi­ous, and sim­i­lar­ly titled “Brides Mag­a­zine Rec­om­mend­ed Pho­tog­ra­ph­er” post.

I rec­om­mend that you read the above men­tioned post before read­ing this one, it’ll just make more sense!
…
I’m guess­ing you’ve read it now, I’ll continue.

The oth­er day, on the way up to Adam and Lor­na’s wed­ding up in the Mid­lands, I bought Brides Magazine.
I often buy it as I actu­al­ly enjoy read­ing it, it gives me plen­ty of inspi­ra­tion and being in the wed­ding indus­try I think it makes a lot of sense to read the same sort of mate­r­i­al that my brides are read­ing too. I keep on top of some of the trends that I might of missed pre­vi­ous­ly on the interweb.
I also like to laugh at the adverts.

So, like I said, I bought it. £4.90 please. Ouch!
I failed to notice, until I was tak­ing the glossy mag­a­zine out of the pack­ag­ing that there was a DVD in there too.
The Sher­locks upon you will work out that this was like­ly the same DVD that I could of been fea­tured on as the rec­om­mend­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er for my region.

Inside the mag­a­zine, lots of pret­ty pic­tures, plen­ty of dodgy adverts (some tak­ing up 5–6 spreads, and one cer­tain com­pa­ny show­ing a mod­el pos­ing as a brides­maid who I can only pre­sume pre­vi­ous­ly had a career as a boxer)…but no men­tion of the scores of infor­ma­tion and links found on the free DVD.

I pop the disc into my lap­top and fol­low the appro­pri­ate links to find who was the pho­tog­ra­ph­er for my region, and I get this;
Screen shot 2010-04-08 at 18.07.20
…Ta-da

This pho­tog­ra­ph­er paid £495 for that advert.
Noth­ing else, no addi­tion­al links, no extra pic­tures and no slideshow. Infact, when I typed into every­body’s favourite search engine “three acorns pho­tog­ra­phy brides mag­a­zine” and even “Thorn­bury Brides Mag­a­zine” (this pho­tog­ra­ph­er is based in Thorn­bury, a lit­tle town down the road), noth­ing came up.
So Brides mag­a­zine don’t even have the time to put togeth­er a sim­ple online direc­to­ry for their pay­ing customers!

What am I saying?..or not say­ing for that matter…

I’m not say­ing that Brides mag­a­zine is con­ning pho­tog­ra­phers out of money.
I’m not say­ing “don’t invest in hav­ing your busi­ness list­ed on their free DVD”
I’m not say­ing I’m bit­ter, because I’m not. I con­sid­er myself pret­ty lucky actually.
I’m also not say­ing that every sin­gle pho­tog­ra­ph­er  list­ed on the DVD will get no book­ings, they just might…in fact I real­ly hope they do!

I’m say­ing, if you’re a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, then research these things first so that you don’t end up spend­ing a lot of mon­ey on very little.
If you’re a bride look­ing for a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, then the DVD might be per­fect for you.
Prob­a­bly not though. It was­n’t that good to be honest!
Just use google.

But again, I thank you Conde Nast pub­lish­ers, and Brides mag­a­zine for ask­ing me to be one of your rec­om­mend­ed photographers.
Very kind of you…I’m still on page one for “Brides Mag­a­zine Rec­om­mend­ed Pho­tog­ra­ph­er”

hehe…

  1. Julie Batterham April 9th, 2010 at 7:44 am

    You did the right thing.

    If they want mon­ey for them to rec­om­mend you isn’t that mmmm .…. bribery or if you were a politi­cian — pos­i­tive lobbying !

    You’re bet­ter off with­out it Joe, you are so good that stick to what you do very very well with­out spend­ing lots of mon­ey — the best rec­om­men­da­tions are free !!

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