Brand building & creating a bridal fair photo display

This is the story of brand building & creating a bridal fair photo display for my photography business.

I’ve been photographing weddings all over the country for the past nine years.

Being a destination wedding photographer has been the perfect blend of my love for telling stories with pictures and for exploring new places.

Last year my wedding photography took me to Charleston, South Carolina to the mountains of Vail, Colorado, onto San Francisco, California and to the rustic Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana. It was all so much fun.

Over the span of my career, I’ve been blessed to photograph some really wonderful wedding couples. What started out as a fun gig for friends at weddings, has cultivated into a wonderful business and creative outlet.

This past decade, my wedding photography business has been running solely on word of mouth and organic searches on the internet. In all that time, I’ve never had an opportunity for a physical public display to showcase my wedding photography business. My needs were changing. Now, brand building and creating my bridal fair business photo display was of utmost importance.

Last weekend I was given my first chance. I was honored to be apart of the Bozeman Bridal Affaire 2014 held at the Strand Union Ballroom on the Montana State University campus in Bozeman, Montana.

It was the first bridal fair that Greener Visuals Photography has participated in. It was important to me that my business made a good first impression.

Designing an impressionable bridal fair photography display

Working within a 10 x 10 ft space allocated by the event space, I needed to be creative both my in design and in how I would transport my bridal fair business photo display.

Sometimes I can be stubborn.

I was not willing to sacrifice visual impact for ease of transportation, especially if my booth was to make a big impact with those wedding couples in attendance.

I’m a strong guy. But after a car accident years ago that left me with constant back aches, I needed to consider the weight of it all.

My booth would represent my formal introduction as the new photographer in town to the brides of southwest Montana. It would also be a greeting to all of the other wedding vendors in the area.

I had some things to consider when planning out my new business branding presence. Questions like what should my brand look like? What kind of feeling should my booth convey to wedding couples moving through maze within the MSU campus ballroom?

Being able to show my fun, wedding photos was one thing. Packaging my photography with the feel of my overall brand was another. I had never done anything like it before.

Finding inspiration from my surroundings

I reveled at what a cool opportunity this process presented me. I discovered the it to be a wonderful exercise to get myself to think differently.

With my logo as the starting point of inspiration, I began piecing together the branding puzzle.

Thinking of things that inspire me, I’ve always loved the old, rustic, barn wood feel of Montana. I wanted to hone the feelings I experienced every summer while visiting the state with family during my youth.

The color and texture schemes of Montana are like no other place on earth.

Besides the gorgeous blue mountain streams filled with trout, the vast forests, and the jagged rocky peaks, what stood out to me most was always seeing the old abandoned barns or homesteads scattered about the landscape. They were worn down by the environmental elements. Often to the point that they had greyed out and had become part of the Montana scenery.

Rough around the edges. Beautifully imperfect.

I wanted to showcase that feeling onto my future wedding clients.

So, I sketched out some concepts and drove over to my parents house in Missoula, Montana. I sought the assistance of my woodworking, savvy father. It would end up being a fun father and son woodworking project.

Together, we set out to build a display that would catch the eye of engaged couples and give a powerful, first impression showcasing my style and brand of Greener Visuals Photography. It was a fun challenge.

Finding our solution

I wanted the display to have a big visual impact in size, have great lighting, and be capable of displaying many large photos. We were still brewing up a concrete design, when we decided drive down into the valley.

We checked out Home Resource, an incredible nonprofit building materials reuse center in Missoula, Montana. Having “green” in my name, I decided “being green” aka reusing existing material, would be a cool concept to incorporate into my project.

We found a bunch of beautiful, old reclaimed barn wood planks, insulated sheet metal heating ducts, and some really nice track lighting. Now that we had our raw materials. So began our visualization of how it would all come together.

Many questions still needed to be answered. How to showcase my wedding photography with a professional look but also make it stand out by being unique in my approach? How could I convey something personal? What feelings would brides experience from seeing my display?

Figuring out what my goals were.

I consider myself a wedding storyteller.

To emphasize that point, I knew I wanted to show my potential wedding clients an entire wedding story in pictures. The ultimate way to show them exactly what they could expect to receive by hiring me as their wedding photographer. That meant I would need to show quite a few photos for just that purpose.

I decided to feature Ashley & David’s Montana wedding story, one of my favorite weddings I photographed from my 2013 wedding season at the Teller Wildlife Refuge in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana.

Along with featuring an entire wedding, it was also important to highlight some of my best photographs. I needed to showcase the range of emotion, moments, and variety of my candid photographic style.

Rather than make the investment of expensive canvas prints (a very popular, beautiful option used by many photographers for displaying photos), I decided instead to be more versatile. I chose to print out high quality photo paper prints.

To me there is still nothing more impactful than seeing a physical photograph in print. After all, every picture tells a story.

Over two weekends, my dad and I created a large, modular, four panel, self-standing, framed display where I could use rare earth magnets to hold my wedding photo prints across the framed metal backdrop.

The design was different, appealing, and I was pleased with the results.

Adding lighting for impact

To add to the visual impact of my images, we fastened the track lighting to a reclaimed long barn wood plank and anchored it across the top to link the two large frames. We rigged the whole lighting system to a dimmer switch which allowed me to dial in the perfect light to accentuate my photographs. By adding a screw to hang my business sign in the center, just like that, a “drawn paper concept” came into fruition.

I was very pleased with the end results.

The best part was that it all could be broken down in size where I could easily carry and fit into the back of my Subaru Outback.

I want to give a big thank you to my dad, John, for all of his assistance and use of his tools.

The premiere of my completed photography display

Last Friday evening, I hauled it all over to the Bridal Affaire location, and got everything all set up in anticipation for the all-day event for Saturday.

My booth was a huge hit. Besides my built display,  I was aLos able to display wedding albums and more information about my photographic services. I had an awesome time meeting a lot of excited, newly-engaged couples and hearing about their wedding plans.

How exciting it must be for them!

It was a really good feeling to see folks engage with my photography. I got as many complements on my booth as I did on my wedding photography.

In the end, I’ll call it a big win for the day and a great stepping stone in my photographic journey. The best news is that my phone has been ringing ever since. I’m already looking forward to the new wedding stories I will get to tell this year. -M