One of the things you might want to consider when choosing your wedding photographer is whether or not they re-invest a portion of their earnings into keeping up with the latest developments in their field.

Investing in education through attending courses, workshops and seminars is one of those things that set professional photographers aside from the others. As we would never want to be considered part of “the others”, we recently attended a 4-day wedding photography course with The Trained Eye in Coleshill, Buckinghamshire. Not only was that great fun to do, but we learned an awful lot as well.

Wedding photography course – Getting down to business

All topics related to running your own wedding photography business were addressed, from the actual financial side of things to shooting techniques and post-production skills within Adobe Lightroom en Photoshop. Wedding photographer David McNeil kicked off the course and talked about photography styles and how light, color, composition and post-production techniques are all contributing to what makes “a style”. We immediately got a chance to put this into practice through a photography session with a couple of good-looking models and a great location. We hope David’s incredible sense of style rubbed off on us .

The next day was spent in the company of wedding photographer Jodie Chapman and she discussed everything there is to know about logistics on a wedding day and how to make sure you get what you need to create the ultimate wedding album. It was a pleasure to see her at work in the afternoon when she mentored us to practice what we had discussed earlier; she is a great inspiration when you’re looking to improve effective shooting in an unobtrusive way.

David was the one to introduce us the following day to some great post-production and editing techniques. It was fascinating to see the enormous variety of editing techniques that can be applied according to personal taste. Lastly, we enjoyed a full day of business talk with “Wedding Photographer of the Year” Mike Garrard and discussed what most people would consider the more boring parts of the trade: numbers. Inevitable but incredibly inspiring if you manage to do it right!

Everyone involved in The Trained Eye’s course has been an incredible resource. They relentlessly brought their own knowledge and experience from the wedding photography business to the table and never failed to answer the many questions that arose. In short, well worth every penny and a definite recommendation to anyone in the field interested in growing on a personal and business level and keeping up-to-date.

More about the course here: The Trained Eye Wedding Photography Course.

And more about this topic on our FAQ page: Why getting Uncle Bob to take the wedding pictures might not be a good idea…