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I’ve been putting this off writing this for months now, mostly because it becomes one of those “what do you say” moments. The last 7 years of wedding photography have been the most rewarding, life changing parts of our lives. We’ve met and retained amazing new friends, we have traveled the world, we’ve lost gear, broken gear, taken workshops and classes, rejoiced in our amazing photos and our good weather luck and had our low moments as well. Partnering with your spouse in business isn’t easy but we have enjoyed every single client we have had. We’ve been trusted to shoot over 200 weddings and be with couples on the most important days of their lives. We’ve been dress hustlers, tissue hunters, therapists, Uber’s, and more. We’ve fallen in love so much with our wedding clients that some are lifelong friends. I remember details about people’s weddings they’ll never remember. It has been a tremendous honor. Just thinking about the years of joy and all of the laughs and moments of the last 7 years, fills me with tears.
So now, on to it- we have to make some changes. Brides freaking out right now- don’t worry.
Over our entire wedding photography career, we (Doug and Kate) have always had day jobs. We both work 40 hours a week (if not more) and this is our weekend escape. We made rules over the years to make this easier (such as no weddings in December, a couple weeks of break here and there) but we would almost always end up breaking those rules because of one reason or another. We kept up, we managed to always deliver weddings in roughly a month to our clients and we also took on family photos, maternity, senior, engagement, and more. We’ve been featured in magazines and even on a book cover and our travel blog has even gotten more attention over the years. It’s been super busy and extremely successful. People would commonly ask me, “Kate, when are you going to quit and just do photography forever?” What people don’t understand though is that I have two equal and competing loves: photography and business. I’ve never loved a job as much as I love the two I have right now but at some point, something had to give. Over the last two years though, my (Kate) travel has dramatically increased and so has my responsibility at my day job. There would be nights I would get home and have to make the decision about which job in the evening I would focus on – catching up on things for my day job and getting ahead with trainings or editing photos and developing my photography business. The choices were hard and they only got harder. I absolutely love my job, I work with some of the smartest people in the machine learning and AI industry and my career path is 100 percent clear to me. While it comes as a surprise to a lot of people that I have this kind of day job I want people to understand that it is just as much a passion of mine as photography is. I love solving complex business problems and working with developers and product gurus to win big. I’ve filed patents, spoken at industry events, and completed multiple certifications within the last year all while balancing a full wedding schedule, editing non stop, and traveling. With the increase in travel and responsibility came the stress of balancing not only weddings but other photos as well (and also you know, marriage and family). It was because of this that earlier in 2017, we decided to stop any non-wedding photography (family, seniors, maternity, etc) and focus only on weddings until the schedule leveled out. The schedule never did, it only got crazier. Then we dropped our blog down to wedding photography only. Even cutting family and non-wedding photos out still didn’t really lighten the load much. We honored all of the families, seniors, and maternity photos that we already had scheduled for the year and just chose not to take any additional work. We apologize to those that contacted us that we were unable to accommodate. When all you have to offer are Sunday appointments, there are only so many you can take, we filled up quickly.
We thought about this for a long time, we debated, I negotiated, we did all the things you do when you are desperately trying to hold on to parts of your life. We finally came up with a solution:
- We capped our 2019 at less than 15 weddings. While I may sneak in one or two more for our light fall, we’re calling the year full as of right now. 2019 brides, don’t panic, we’re so excited about our 2019 weddings and we can’t wait to bring it. It will be our best year yet. We are 100 percent committed to our wedding schedule. If you are wanting to book 2019 contact us anyway there may be some dates we are still willing to take.
- At this time, we will not be accepting weddings in 2020. Over the next couple of months, we are going to work on our schedule and attempt to accommodate a limited number of weddings in 2020 (local to the Effingham area and destination). We have not opened the year up for booking yet because we are still working on our schedule but once we do, we’ll accept a few depending on location and date. If our schedule can accommodate more, we will communicate that.
- Longer term- we will be accepting projects on a requested basis. Our website will soon be updated to reflect that process. I still want to be able to accept destination weddings, weddings for folks I’ve known for years, and corporate projects. Stay tuned for more details.
- We will not be participating in the 2019 Keller Convention Center Bridal Show. It was hard to drop out of this as it is one of my favorite events ever and I’ll miss all my vendor friends. I’ll miss all the cake samples.
- We will not be accepting new clients for family, senior, or maternity for a while.We have a few cousins and close family that have drafted us into senior pictures or family with lots of notice, we’ll be wrapping up any promised work we have already committed to for our families.
We won’t be going “cold turkey.” I still have this passion for photography that can’t be tamed and we’ll have to find ways to make photography work with our life. We appreciate all our friends and the support we have received in making this change in our life to go from 30 plus weddings a year down to just a handful. We’ve had mixed reactions but we’ll do everything we can to make sure we can keep photography in our life. If you hear crazy rumors like “we completely quit” or “we moved” or “Doug is pregnant with an alien and we can no longer come out of the house” just know that the real truth is here. If we have to decline a wedding for 2019 and beyond, we’ll be sending referrals to some of our favorite local area photographers so that couples reaching out to us will be in good hands. Stay tuned for more- we’ll be posting our new process for requesting wedding dates in the coming month to allow us better consideration of our schedule. It’s been an incredible journey and while ours is going to begin to start winding down, it isn’t over just yet. I personally think the best is yet to come.
Thank you to all our incredible clients- words can’t describe the emotion I feel when thinking about the past 7 years. We can’t wait to make 2019 just as amazing as the last few years have been.
Cheers-
The Keys
