Understanding clients real needs – by Rick Mason

The following post was very kindly written by Rick Mason, a fantastic wedding photographer based in Kent. You can view some of Rick’s excellent work on his website at www.rjmphotographic.com

Rick – thank you for taking the time to write this post, I found it very interesting and I am sure that others will too!

Understanding Clients Real Needs
This a short post about the danger of Assumption. We all try to learn from our mistakes (mistakes are crucial to learning!) and I have certainly made a few. One of the mistakes I have made was failing to understand exactly what my wedding clients were after. Rather than listening actively to what they said, I simply imposed my preferred style of photography upon them – which resulted in an unhappy gig for me and possibly less than 100% satisfaction for them!

My style of wedding photography is to take a fairly relaxed and what I call a ‘non-invasive’ approach which I think allows the happy couple to really enjoy their big day. I like to take a largely ‘documentary’ approach to the day – shooting events as they happen. I am not that interested in taking hundreds of family and friend group shots… or spending too much time on detailed set-up shots. I will do so however if that is what the clients really want.

I think the problem here is in the terminology we all use. Wedding photography, like other professions, develops its own jargon with mysterious phrases like ‘documentary’ and ‘reportage’ or even ‘traditional’. The potential danger here is that one person’s definition may well vary considerably from another’s. Therein lies the problem.

I now spend much more time at client meetings really getting a handle on the types of images that they really want. I ask for a general outline and then probe a little deeper. When I find myself using jargon of any sort, I explain what I mean by the term. I will also ask them to actually show me photographs that they like whether from my website or anybody else’s. I generally add a proviso that I may not be able to reproduce a particular image perfectly but I have a lot more information that I can then build into my plan for the day and to decide whether I am really the wedding photographer they want.

I am sure that I will continue to make mistakes and learn from them, but I now know the importance of truly listening to my clients.

Rick Mason
www.rjmphotographic.com