The Amazing Sony A1/A7/A9/APS-C & Anything else welcome Mega Thread!

Raymond Lin said:
The 860II is more useful in the fact that it has a bounce card. But it's a big lump and as a fill flash you don't need all that power. So what I ended up doing is using the V1 as off camera flashes. Might get a single 350 later on as they are very cheap, relatively speaking.

The A200 is twice the power of the 860II so its quite insane, and it's about the same size.

If I recall correctly this is at full power, it took quite a lot of light to match the scene.
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Thanks, I'm going off the 860II idea, now stuck deciding between the V-1 and the AD-200, quite like the Ak-R1 kit!
 
Raymond Lin said:
Erm, the Sigma 12-24/2.8 now out on the Sony and it’s smaller than before?! Now I’m wondering if I should return the Tamron and get the Sigma instead, it is £550 extra though.

https://www.cliftoncameras.co.uk/si...uIoBhq80AsW1aq2g_zSon6cp6ixoVJ-xoCPtcQAvD_BwE
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It's still heavier and using standard filters would be a problem. On my Nikon system I have a 16-35 and 14-24 and I use the 16-35 the most for that reason although love the 14-24 for certain things.
 
I printed a 30+ picture stich last night of a night scene from Singapore. It's only A4 but I'm very happy with the result and I'm thinking about doing an A3 but I'll have to get my pc fixed first as it overheats and huts down when working hard so I had to limit the size of the individual pictures. I think it looks really nice at A4 and noise just isn't visible even when looking at it with a magnifying glass :D
 
It'll be interesting to see the reviews and sample pictures. This may not be an astro lens for perfectionists but it may be fine for more casual stuff... like wot I do :D and it may even be better than my 17 and 19mm film era manual lenses.

I'd just about convinced myself that I have everything I need :D

PS.
I keep thinking back to the Sigma 20mm f1.8 I had. It didn't get universally good reviews but I liked that lens.
 
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Too expensive for their crap build quality.

Will see what the real prices are on release.

So far I’ve been extremely happy adapting a Canon fit new version of the Tamron 17-35mm 2.8-4 OSD. It’s 2.8 to 20mm and a very sharp lens.
 
TGphoto said:
Too expensive for their crap build quality.

Will see what the real prices are on release.

So far I’ve been extremely happy adapting a Canon fit new version of the Tamron 17-35mm 2.8-4 OSD. It’s 2.8 to 20mm and a very sharp lens.
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think you'd be better off with the native tamron 17-28mm
 
TGphoto said:
Too expensive for their crap build quality.

Will see what the real prices are on release.

So far I’ve been extremely happy adapting a Canon fit new version of the Tamron 17-35mm 2.8-4 OSD. It’s 2.8 to 20mm and a very sharp lens.
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I had that lens way back when it was horrendous in the corners, but if you could ignore that it wasn't too bad.
 
f/2.8 said:
Social media advertising for wedding photographers has a better R.O.I than adwords
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Can I ask roughly how much you spend per enquiry on Facebook? I've but given up as I rarely get anything for £20 - not a peep
 
robinsslee said:
Reaching out for your FB photo page?
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Not sure what you mean. I use Facebook Ads, it worked well for me at the beginning of the year, but since the change it's been a flop no matter what I try. I'm just trying to gauge the rough spend per enquiry people are getting :p. Not asking for their secrets, just their success :)
 
woof woof said:
It'll be interesting to see the reviews and sample pictures. This may not be an astro lens for perfectionists but it may be fine for more casual stuff... like wot I do :D and it may even be better than my 17 and 19mm film era manual lenses.

I'd just about convinced myself that I have everything I need :D

PS.
I keep thinking back to the Sigma 20mm f1.8 I had. It didn't get universally good reviews but I liked that lens.
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I have perfectionist astro lens i.e. 24GM :D

Just need an UWA because in some case I love the perspective it give. I like the small size aspect of this but I am also going to be close watching for the optical performance.
AF doesn't really matter as long as AF-S works accurately which it does for all other samyang lenses.
 
f/2.8 said:
I had that lens way back when it was horrendous in the corners, but if you could ignore that it wasn't too bad.
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they have released a new version since which is suppose to be a lot better in corners.
 
Jase said:
It's still heavier and using standard filters would be a problem. On my Nikon system I have a 16-35 and 14-24 and I use the 16-35 the most for that reason although love the 14-24 for certain things.
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It’s only the “must have the best” aspect in me wanting it.

Pros

Cover 12-24 and stops where my primes starts
Better built
The focus and zoom ring the regular way round
Manual focus button

Cons
Can’t take filters
£550 more

I guess in my entire photography career I have never had wider than 16mm so there’s no reason why I suddenly need 12mm...
 
Someone either sell me your 85GM or take my mint 85FE plus £680 cash :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 
gilbouk said:
Can I ask roughly how much you spend per enquiry on Facebook? I've but given up as I rarely get anything for £20 - not a peep
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I don't count an enquiry as a success, only bookings. I don't run Facebook paid adverts as Facebook is dead in the water.

You have zero chance of any success with a 20 quid budget though on any advertising platform I would have thought but I could of course be wrong.

I don't know what sort of photography services you offer but we have had some success advertising our wedding photography business on Instagram. More so with adverts aimed at only sending people to our website rather than trying to sell our service directly from an advert if that makes sense.

We run a range of different types of adverts on different platforms with a marketing budget of around £200-£300 per month. At the busier times of the year for bookings the budget jumps up to around £800-£1200 per month. It's impossible to say X amount of bookings costs X amount of Advertising budget as marketing is as much about putting yourself out there and being recognised as a brand. Just as a small example about a year ago we ran a competition, we are still getting bookings from people who interacted with that competition a year later. I dare this is because people get engaged and then don't set a date, start looking at suppliers sometimes 12-18 month or even later. For those people we need to keep marketing so that we are in their mind for when they do decide they are ready to book someone. Our budget includes everything marketing related so that's paid adverts, S.E.O and other stuff. We don't do wedding fayres or any print advertising.

How we do things won't work for everybody else though, and I am not gonna put myself out there saying we are super successful and you should do what we do because we are not. Last year we photographed 54 weddings, this year we will photograph 46, we have 39 booked at the moment for next year and 16 booked for 2021. I have no idea if that is good, bad or indifferent compared to others. We don't really want to do any more than 40 weddings a year any more and in the future we plan on cutting that down further. That along with some commercial work I do, works perfect for us. It's probably worth saying we are in the budget to mid price range so our market may be very different to yours. We seem to have found a little bit of a niche in that a lot of our couples are around the same age, have similar professions (at least 2 thirds of our weddings are for nurses, police officers and teachers) and get married at similar venues. Not 100% sure if this is down to marketing or if these people just think we are a good fit for them. We also get a good bit of work from referrals. As an example some time ago we photographed a wedding for a couple who are both police officers, we have gotten absolutely loads of other work directly from that one.
 
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@f2.8 seems to know how stuff big time when it comes to marketing and seemingly runs a well oiled machine but one that requires a decent budget as well.

One method I’ve seen some using recently very heavily is instagram. Not sure how successful it’s been but they’re constant building ‘engagement’) have a decent amount of followers and some have around 50 bookings next year. Obviously, they do other marketing as well but just one avenue to consider.
 
gilbouk said:
Can I ask roughly how much you spend per enquiry on Facebook? I've but given up as I rarely get anything for £20 - not a peep
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Thing is, it's not just about putting out a boosted post. It's having a decent image, decent copy, decent targeting, good landing page and so on. You can't just throw money and expect the leads to roll in. It also depends on time of year, we're heading into my typical time to book for next year so would expect more enquiries than I did in July. You also need a website that works for getting people to contact.

As @f/2.8 says, what works for one may not work for another. I get 80% of my work through facebook, he says it's dead for where he is. So you have to figure out where your ideal clients are and get to them there. If all your competitors are using FB then you may want to focus on other methods. One photographer round here does 60+ a year and barely does any marketing, now that's the goal!
 
TGphoto said:
@f2.8 seems to know how stuff big time when it comes to marketing and seemingly runs a well oiled machine but one that requires a decent budget as well.

One method I’ve seen some using recently very heavily is instagram. Not sure how successful it’s been but they’re constant building ‘engagement’) have a decent amount of followers and some have around 50 bookings next year. Obviously, they do other marketing as well but just one avenue to consider.
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Instagram is good in terms of putting yourself out there. However all is not always what it seems. I recently seen that a very well known photographer who I know a little bit was running training on how to be successful on Instagram. I didn't go to the training but got the general gist of it and it was all good stuff in terms of getting engagement etc. The guy that ran the training has a pretty good following on Insta with lots of engagement and from the outside looking in you would absolutely think that this is where he gets the majority of his business from.

Now here is a little secret that same guy got in touch with me just over 18 months ago asking me how to get more bookings from Instagram, after he had seen a comment I had made on a wedding photographer group on Facebook. A few of the things I shared with him made it into the "training" he was offering. Even at that point he already had what I would call a busy Instagram account but he told me privately he was getting around one enquiry on Instagram every 2 months. Now fast forward 18 months, he has just trained others on how to get the most from Instagram, his Instagram has exploded over the same time frame with huge interaction and he has become sort of semi famous in wedding photography circles of the back of that. To be fair he is a very gifted photographer and I absolutely love what he produces. Any way so about 2 weeks ago I ran into him while out and about and we got chatting and he confided that even with having a huge Instagram following and massive interaction he was averaging one enquiry directly through Instagram a month and has only got a very small number of bookings directly from Instagram.

To do what he does on Instagram is a huge amount of work, almost a full time job in itself. Now I dare say he has taken loads of bookings from people that seen his work on Instagram but contacted him through his website etc. But Instagram isn't the magic pill it is made out to be. Instagram isn't for that guy isn't even the biggest driver of traffic to his website in terms of social media, Pinterest is.
 
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T_J_G said:
I also see a lot of fully booked for xxxx year, then 6 months down the line 2 more weddings taken on for the same year...
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TGphoto said:
Yeah I do often wonder how honest some of them are being. It’s easy to say ‘I’m 90% booked so get in now’, I mean, companies do it online all the time to scaremonger people into purchasing.
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Very few wedding photographers tell the truth about bookings etc for whatever reason especially when they are talking to other photographers.

At my last wedding the video guy was telling me some interesting stuff about a wedding photographer who is well known here, claims to shoot 70+ weddings a year at an extremely high starting price with an even higher average sale. The photographer I guess in this case has made a bit of a rod for his own back by putting himself out there as an industry expert.

Anyway the video guy knows him well, as they have known each other since they where kids. They both work in the same area and regularly are booked for the same weddings. The photographer has made it widely known that he is earning 6 figures purely from weddings alone. The video guy was telling me that he had to laugh at that as at the time he was making a really big deal about this he was driving around in a 2005 beat up Volkswagon Golf which was always breaking down. He was also working at quite a few budget venues. The photographer was claiming he had a starting price of over 5k, the video guy showed me a recent price list for the same photographer with prices starting at £1200.

Take anything that others say with a pinch of salt especially those that are "putting themselves out there" offering training on running a wedding photography business etc.
 
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f/2.8 said:
I don't count an enquiry as a success, only bookings. I don't run Facebook paid adverts as Facebook is dead in the water.
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...for you.

I have an ongoing £1 per day Facebook ad running and alongside direct recommendations from previous clients it’s been comfortably the best avenue for me in terms of enquiries and bookings, particularly during the traditional quiet summer season (for bookings) where there is almost no competition from wedding fayres. Bang for buck it’s miles ahead of what I’ve spent on wedding fayres and still my most reliable source of weddings. I rarely actually post on Facebook, the ad just directs to my website and the stats on my Squarespace dashboard reflect that traffic pretty well.

I’m very specific and local with my settings (I only have it set up to reach the nearest 10 or so towns) and I think I only specified wedding and engagement keywords. If I don’t already know of the potential client via a referral I’d say 8 times out of 10 when I ask they say they saw my Facebook ad. At £365 per year it’s an absolute no brainer for me, it cost less than the postcards alone for the autumn and spring wedding fayres lined up over the next 6 months.

To put it on the table, I'm an £800 (part-time) photographer averaging 15-20 weddings per year (14 booked in for 2020 so far), my entire annual marketing budget is under £1000. 20 weddings is about my limit in terms of comfort so I'm very happy with the setup/balance.

As an aside, I know a part-time wedding photographer who posted a 'still some dates available in 2019' post back early in the summer. I know for a fact they have two weddings booked this year.
 
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f/2.8 said:
Very few wedding photographers tell the truth about bookings etc for whatever reason especially when they are talking to other photographers.

At my last wedding the video guy was telling me some interesting stuff about a wedding photographer who is well known here, claims to shoot 70+ weddings a year at an extremely high starting price with an even higher average sale. The photographer I guess in this case has made a bit of a rod for his own back by putting himself out there as an industry expert.

Anyway the video guy knows him well, as they have known each other since they where kids. They both work in the same area and regularly are booked for the same weddings. The photographer has made it widely known that he is earning 6 figures purely from weddings alone. The video guy was telling me that he had to laugh at that as at the time he was making a really big deal about this he was driving around in a 2005 beat up Volkswagon Golf which was always breaking down. He was also working at quite a few budget venues. The photographer was claiming he had a starting price of over 5k, the video guy showed me a recent price list for the same photographer with prices starting at £1200.

Take anything that others say with a pinch of salt especially those that are "putting themselves out there" offering training on running a wedding photography business etc.
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I reckon I could guess the name in one go. Is there a D in the initials LOL
 
ukaskew said:
...for you.
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Yep exactly what I said, what works for me, won't work for others and the opposite also applies.

As I have already said I am absolutely not putting myself up there as any sort of expert or as being super successful because that simply wouldn't be true.

In terms of Facebook when we first started it was very good to us and at that point a lot of the work we booked came directly from there.

That dropped of the table a couple of years ago though and while we still have a presence there we don't get a huge amount of traffic to our website from Facebook any more and we don't get that many enquiries directly from Facebook any more either. Quite a few of our couples don't use Facebook at all but have an old account that they don't use any more or don't have Facebook at all.

When they do have a Facebook account we still stick a photo up from their wedding etc. and I guess we are still pretty active on there just because my missus likes Facebook, she pretty much runs our business page I don't take much to do with it.
 
f/2.8 said:
I don't count an enquiry as a success, only bookings. I don't run Facebook paid adverts as Facebook is dead in the water.

You have zero chance of any success with a 20 quid budget though on any advertising platform I would have thought but I could of course be wrong.

I don't know what sort of photography services you offer but we have had some success advertising our wedding photography business on Instagram. More so with adverts aimed at only sending people to our website rather than trying to sell our service directly from an advert if that makes sense.

We run a range of different types of adverts on different platforms with a marketing budget of around £200-£300 per month. At the busier times of the year for bookings the budget jumps up to around £800-£1200 per month. It's impossible to say X amount of bookings costs X amount of Advertising budget as marketing is as much about putting yourself out there and being recognised as a brand. Just as a small example about a year ago we ran a competition, we are still getting bookings from people who interacted with that competition a year later. I dare this is because people get engaged and then don't set a date, start looking at suppliers sometimes 12-18 month or even later. For those people we need to keep marketing so that we are in their mind for when they do decide they are ready to book someone. Our budget includes everything marketing related so that's paid adverts, S.E.O and other stuff. We don't do wedding fayres or any print advertising.

How we do things won't work for everybody else though, and I am not gonna put myself out there saying we are super successful and you should do what we do because we are not. Last year we photographed 54 weddings, this year we will photograph 46, we have 39 booked at the moment for next year and 16 booked for 2021. I have no idea if that is good, bad or indifferent compared to others. We don't really want to do any more than 40 weddings a year any more and in the future we plan on cutting that down further. That along with some commercial work I do, works perfect for us. It's probably worth saying we are in the budget to mid price range so our market may be very different to yours. We seem to have found a little bit of a niche in that a lot of our couples are around the same age, have similar professions (at least 2 thirds of our weddings are for nurses, police officers and teachers) and get married at similar venues. Not 100% sure if this is down to marketing or if these people just think we are a good fit for them. We also get a good bit of work from referrals. As an example some time ago we photographed a wedding for a couple who are both police officers, we have gotten absolutely loads of other work directly from that one.
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Thanks for the info Tommy - I guess I am pricing myself way to cheap with takings of between £249 and £499 for Weddings this year and find myself unable to afford much in the way of advertising which is biting me in the bum. I have around 30 weddings for 2019 - most done now, and only around 7 bookings for next year at my new higher price. I will try directing people to my website instead of expecting enquiries directly on the back of my social media advertising. Being new, having a website that is not ranking, not doing fayres, and relying on word of mouth and my Facebook Business Page audience which is now over 1000 and Gumtree hasn't been good for me the last few months - also giving too much time to processing and not enough at finding new business is a guilty habit. I'm lucky if I get an enquiry a month :-(
 
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ukaskew said:
...for you.

I have an ongoing £1 per day Facebook ad running and alongside direct recommendations from previous clients it’s been comfortably the best avenue for me in terms of enquiries and bookings, particularly during the traditional quiet summer season (for bookings) where there is almost no competition from wedding fayres. Bang for buck it’s miles ahead of what I’ve spent on wedding fayres and still my most reliable source of weddings. I rarely actually post on Facebook, the ad just directs to my website and the stats on my Squarespace dashboard reflect that traffic pretty well.

I’m very specific and local with my settings (I only have it set up to reach the nearest 10 or so towns) and I think I only specified wedding and engagement keywords. If I don’t already know of the potential client via a referral I’d say 8 times out of 10 when I ask they say they saw my Facebook ad. At £365 per year it’s an absolute no brainer for me, it cost less than the postcards alone for the autumn and spring wedding fayres lined up over the next 6 months.

To put it on the table, I'm an £800 (part-time) photographer averaging 15-20 weddings per year (14 booked in for 2020 so far), my entire annual marketing budget is under £1000. 20 weddings is about my limit in terms of comfort so I'm very happy with the setup/balance.

As an aside, I know a part-time wedding photographer who posted a 'still some dates available in 2019' post back early in the summer. I know for a fact they have two weddings booked this year.
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I'm going to try this approach - I've been spending £20 in a few days - on and off - with no enquiries. Perhaps directing people to my website and doing a slow burner like yourself might give me better results. Thanks for the info
 
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gilbouk said:
Thanks for the info Tommy - I guess I am pricing myself way to cheap with takings of between £249 and £499 for Weddings this year and find myself unable to afford much in the way of advertising which is biting me in the bum. I have around 30 weddings for 2019 - most done now, and only around 7 bookings for next year at my new higher price. I will try directing people to my website instead of expecting enquiries directly on the back of my social media advertising. Being new, having a website that is not ranking, not doing fayres, and relying on word of mouth and my Facebook Business Page audience which is now over 1000 and Gumtree hasn't been good for me the last few months - also giving too much time to processing and not enough at finding new business is a guilty habit. I'm lucky if I get an enquiry a month :-(
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I can't speak for anyone else and we all have to learn the game and start somewhere. I personally found as our prices increased we needed to find new ways of finding clients as people with different budgets hang out in different places.

I don't know if you are part time or full time but charging at that pricing level will mean as you have said yourself you will never the option of doing anything really in terms of marketing. There is a reason why the average cost of a wedding photographer is around £1000. Marketing is a must really and you will need some sort of budget for it.

If you are part time maybe don't worry if you are only doing weddings for beer tokens you could easily stay at your current pricing level and still get work just based on price alone.

If you are full time or looking to go full time those prices won't be sustainable as once you pay for income tax, national insurance, on going equipment cost and insurance, website plus marketing etc. you are going to be making a huge loss if you are competing on the same level as the other average Joe wedding photographers.

No budget for marketing no matter how you do it, means no bookings. Bookings don't just appear out of thin air. Yes absolutely do a great job and you will get recommendations but you will struggle to run a full time wedding photography business on that alone just because the market is so saturated.

I know a lot of other wedding photographers including those at the cheaper end, I consider us to be at the cheaper end, but then there is cheap and then there is ridiculously cheap. From the sounds of it you have fallen into the trap that a lot of new wedding photographers do as in you have found that you can get bookings at a really dirt cheap price and have been afraid to take that jump to the next pricing level in case you lose that. Problem is if you don't jump at some point it will too late. You will find that you will get a rep for being that cheap guy. The problem with that is that when you do get recommendations those people will expect those ridiculously cheap prices as well and because you will never have the budget for marketing you end up stuck in a loop of not earning enough to work properly and ever decreasing level of bookings.

You will probably find that there is couples out there who have looked at you and not booked because it seemed a bit dodgy that you where so ridiculously cheap.

Don't get to hung up on numbers on social media. Just to give you an idea we have over 13k followers on Instagram and over 7k on Facebook and it means absolutely nothing, if we relied purely on social media for work we would be done within months. Social media is great as part of an overall marketing strategy but should never be the only thing you are looking at in terms of promoting yourself.

There is a guy local to me, he is very busy but I know that he spends £800 on adwords a month, £500 on social media adverts a month and has a company that looks after his website and S.E.O at £600 a month. He is also present at all the larger local wedding fayres and advertises in a lot of the local wedding rags. That is what you are potentially competing against.
 
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