Michelle Daly Deschryver likes to joke that she has been to more weddings than anyone else she knows, but has only been married once. “And that was enough!”
She is a professional photographer who lives and works in Reno, Nevada. After earning a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, she went into photography full time, first as a real estate photographer and later as a wedding photographer.
“To do well in this business,” she says, “you need to be good at photography and good at business. The marketplace is always in flux, and you need to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd, because there are a lot of wedding photographers out there.” She built her business slowly but steadily, building a portfolio of her best work and relying heavily on word-of-mouth. She established her reputation as an excellent wedding photographer and her business has grown slowly but surely.
A typical wedding job, she says, is a long day – at least eight hours of setting up and shooting. It isn’t uncommon for jobs to stretch into fourteen hour days; and on one occasion, she had a mind-bending twenty-one hour shoot. “That was a record,” she says today. “Whether it was a personal best or personal worst, I couldn’t say.” Whatever the length of the job, it takes a lot of mental and physical effort as she follows the bride and groom around, documenting their big day. She usually eats a lot of energy bars to keep going. And at the end of the day she’s wiped out, with her back and shoulders aching from lugging around all her gear.
But Michelle Daly Deschryver says she loves it: she loves being paid to be creative, and she loves being her own boss. When she isn’t working, she is raising her two daughters and planning new activities with them.
Sources:
https://iso.500px.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-wedding-photographer-manuel-orero/
http://photographyconcentrate.com/10-most-difficult-things-about-being-wedding-photographer/
She is a professional photographer who lives and works in Reno, Nevada. After earning a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, she went into photography full time, first as a real estate photographer and later as a wedding photographer.
“To do well in this business,” she says, “you need to be good at photography and good at business. The marketplace is always in flux, and you need to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd, because there are a lot of wedding photographers out there.” She built her business slowly but steadily, building a portfolio of her best work and relying heavily on word-of-mouth. She established her reputation as an excellent wedding photographer and her business has grown slowly but surely.
A typical wedding job, she says, is a long day – at least eight hours of setting up and shooting. It isn’t uncommon for jobs to stretch into fourteen hour days; and on one occasion, she had a mind-bending twenty-one hour shoot. “That was a record,” she says today. “Whether it was a personal best or personal worst, I couldn’t say.” Whatever the length of the job, it takes a lot of mental and physical effort as she follows the bride and groom around, documenting their big day. She usually eats a lot of energy bars to keep going. And at the end of the day she’s wiped out, with her back and shoulders aching from lugging around all her gear.
But Michelle Daly Deschryver says she loves it: she loves being paid to be creative, and she loves being her own boss. When she isn’t working, she is raising her two daughters and planning new activities with them.
Sources:
https://iso.500px.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-wedding-photographer-manuel-orero/
http://photographyconcentrate.com/10-most-difficult-things-about-being-wedding-photographer/