Page 17 - Capture Nov-Jan 2021

a look back at 2020 wedding & portrait
Wedding & Portrait
The Year in Review
In March this year, weddings were being postponed or cancelled across the world. And portrait sessions became impossible as people were confined to their own homes. This didn’t just last for weeks. It was months before we all emerged from isolation. To describe the situation as ‘challenging’ hardly comes close to encapsulating just how difficult a time it’s been for wedding and portrait photographers. But, many mustered new resources, found new attitudes, and dusted off dormant skills. Candide McDonald reports.
For ACT wedding photographer Kelly Tunney, smaller, intimate weddings were the only way forward, and she seized this trend to keep her business buoyant. This wasn’t, though, her first response. “I didn’t want to consider anything new when this all started. I didn’t want to adapt my business or do ‘front porch’ sessions from my car. Call it denial, but I was too down and depressed to think creativity. I felt very content to quit my business after fourteen years. It was a few months of fear, but things turned around...eventually.”
Conquering negativity
Tunney’s motivation to look for and seize opportunities waxed and waned throughout the year, she adds. “Some new business ideas have been exciting to experiment with, but also scary. Nobody knows how this will pan out for our industry. If you ask me, say, on a Tuesday, I’ll be stoked for these new developments, but try me again by Thursday, I might be depleted from all that good energy and ready to quit. It’s a weird roller coaster so many of us are on.” What did help, she notes, was the power of Zoom. “While we weren’t able to meet loads of couples in person, technology is definitely easier than ever before. I know photographers have made Zoom a second camera for them to shoot portraits of their clients in their home.”
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