Wedding Gift Vouchers

Aurora is really pleased to be able to offer something new,which we think will help our clients enormously. Most couples have lived together for several years before the wedding and the traditional wedding gift list is no longer appropriate – who needs another 3 toasters? But what most couples tell us they would find useful is something which they can use to enhance their memories of the day and will be cherished for years to come. One of the things which attract our clients to us are our fantastic premium quality albums. These take about 100 hours to complete and are truly the best albums available. But such painstaking quality can never be cheap.

And so…. we introduce the photography Gift Voucher. Nothing could be simpler or more useful. Couples simply add the voucher scheme to their gift list and their relatives and friends can telephone or email us to order a voucher with a face value of their choice. If they don’t wish the couples to know how much they have paid then this can be kept private. After the wedding, couples bring the vouchers and redeem them against one of our fantastic album upgrades or wall prints. So now our fantastic hand-made top-of-the-range albums are a realistic option for everyone.  Simple.

Oh – and if you want your vouchers truly personalised then we give you a free engagement portrait shoot and you can have the vouchers printed using one of these pictures. Even more simple.

If you’re a bride and would like further details of the scheme just give us a ring on 01673 844519 and we’ll be glad to advise.

Branston Hall Wedding Fair

Wow. What a Fair that was! You know we’re on record as saying that, in our opinion, Branston Hall ranks as one of the two best wedding venues in the county. Well the same goes for their wedding fairs – there are a lot of paltry, piddling little fairs dotted around the county, but this is THE one that brides should visit.
We’ve been exhibiting at Branston since I started Aurora Studio, about 12 years ago. In the good/bad old days it wasa much smaller affair, with only Branston’s recommended suppliers ( and we all had to reach very demanding standards to be on their list) invited to attend. Maybe 50 – 100 brides would pass through their doors on the day.
But times change and nowadays the number of brides is nearer 1000. In recent years the popularity of the Wedding Fair has actually been its problem. All those 1000 brides attended in a four hour period so parking was a nightmare, moving around the Fair was difficult and the stalls were so busy that only a small percentage of brides could actually speak to the suppliers they wanted to.
But the new manager, Dave Robinson took over last autumn and , welll…. new brooms and all that…. he had his own ideas on how the Fair should develop. The most radical was to spread the Fair over two days. If we’re honest most of the suppliers had their doubts – would anyone attend on the Saturday with conflicting pressures of football for the grooms and normal Saturday shopping for the brides? But we were all proved wrong. Quite simply, it worked! Numbers overall were sllightly up but, more importantly, those brides were spread over a ten hour period, instead of four hours. So the stands were not constantly crowded. Brides could have a chat with suppliers and get a much better feel for the level of professionalism they could expect. The whole experience of attending the Fair was vastly improved for everyone.
From our perspective we can only say that the downside has been we’re finding it difficult to find enough evening spots for clients to come around and chat to us with a view to booking us for their wedding. On Monday and Tuesday after the Fair the phones didn’t stop ringing!

Thanks to Branston we’ve met some really nice people whose wedding it will be a real pleasure to cover and we have plenty more booked to see us over the next fortnight. The clients are all giving really positive feedback on the Fair too. With a wide range of prices covered by different vendors in all categories there was something there for everyone and all have benefitted.

ore than ever, the Branston Hall Wedding Fair will be THE Fair to attend next January.

Our Cover-Girl Brides

One of the things we feel most strongly about within our wedding photography is in our approach to the bride. Our brides are all real people, not over- posed models and the wedding is a very real occasion, not a fashion shoot. So the bride’s feelings on this very special occasion are paramount. We don’t want her to stand around posing for hours; we don’t want her to feel bored and we certainly don’t want to do anything which might spoil her enjoyment of the day.

And yet, the bride will have spent a small fortune on the dress, the shoes, the hair – the whole package which she knows will make her look stunning. And it’s our job to show her at her best. Anyone can take snapshots, but harsh lighting, the wrong angle or a distracting background can make a beautiful woman look just ordinary. And ordinary is not how any bride wants to remember herself on her wedding day!

So photographing a bride at her best is one of the things we make sure we do best. There’s no pressure, no stress and no faffing about. Our efforts are always rewarded by the bride’s gratitude, but we’ve been honoured with a different from of recognition also. Over the past three year no fewer than 12 of our weddings have appeared in magazines as ‘Weddings of the Month’ features – usually a five or six page article on the wedding and illustrated with lovely photographs to show the happiness of the bride and groom on their wedding day.

Being asked by magazines to suggest suitable weddings and supply the images is, of course, very flattering both to us and to the couples involved. It’s quite something to have your wedding shown to the world in the pages of an up-market magazine and we’re always delighted to help couples who might wish for this to achieve their ambition. But this year we’ve gone one further and two of our brides can now truthfully claim themselves to be Covergirls!

We were approached by a publisher to provide pictures to use as editorial illustration in one of their bridal magazines. This happens quite often and, after checking that it’s o.k. with the brides and grooms we just sent them a CD of more or less random images. A few weeks later we got a phone call confirming that a large proportion would be used AND one of them they liked so much they would like to use it on the front cover. Needless to say, both we and Jennie, the bride, were delighted. Most magazine ‘wedding’ images are actually posed by models because the stress and hurly-burly of a genuine wedding doesn’t allow the photographer as much control as on a staged shoot. So we’re always delighted when our images appear within a mag. But on the front-cover!!! Wow!

We were still trying not to smile about this when, even before the mag came out we got another phonecall from th editor. They’d loved the cover-pic so much that they wanted to feature another of our brides in their next publication!

So 2009 ended on a positive note for us and our brides. Jenny can now be seen looking out from many a newsagents shelf, whilst Gill should be published in the next couple of weeks. It just vindicates our business model of taking pictures of brides at their best without giving them stress.

Phew!

Well, it nearly killed us, but we did it! Never have we had such a rush of album orders as we had in the weeks before Xmas this year. The unusual pattern of bookings for last summer, combined with the January price-hike by our main two album manufacturers, meant that November and early December ( which is the quiet period when we normally take our annual holidays) was this year simply manic. Everyone wanted their album order in amd completed asap. Our problem, of course, is that we don’t use cheap, templaye-based siftware packages which throw albums together in a matter of minutes. One if our distinguishing features is the quality of the design work in our albums. Which means, of course, that WE do the designing. We wouldn’t change this – it means that we can tailor and fine tune each page to ensure it recaptures the mood of the wedding at that particular time. But good design is time-consuming. And with so many album orders coming in together we have certainly felt the presssure to deliver the goods this year. Producing storybook albums is easy, but produciong ones of which we are truly proud and which the couples will cherish forever – all within a ludicrously short time-scale -  most certainly is not easy. But it’s done, the orders have all been sent to the album manufacturers, and it’s time to sit back a little, digest the Christmas pudding and look back on why it happened.

It was my fault – of course. Simply, I chickened out. Towards the end of 2008 all the television and newspaper predictions were of gloom and doom for 2009. Businesses would crumble, millions would be unemployed, the end of the global economy was nigh. The photography forums were full of professional photographers saying how bad business was and we knew of several reputable photographers who had folded. Could the unthinkable happen and the same happen to us?

So I over-reacted. Our business model has always been built on the concept of covering no more than 30 weddings a year but in spending inordinate amounts of time on posy-production of each one to ensure that the finished albums were q

Things are finally quietening down for us on the wedding front! After a truly hectic year it’s nice to be able to take a short break before our Xmas weddings. We always look forward to December weddings. Yes, the light is bad and the weather often atrocious, but there’s something really special about weddings at this time of the year. We enjoy the challenge of working in poor lighting conditions and get a fantastic kick out of creating beautiful images for couples in what can be really adverse conditions ( fog is probably the greatest challenge of all!) . That said,  it’s our job to get the best out of any situation whatever the time of the year so maybe December weddings aren’t really all that different in that respect.

I think it’s the guests actually that make Xmas weddings so rewarding. The Xmas atmosphere is felt by all and as December progresses everyone becomes more and more ready to party. The good venues like Branston Hall, Hemswell Court etc etc are all decked in Xmas decorations; often the brides colour schemes reflecting the seasonal theme and the mulled wine usually offered at Xmas weddings all combine with the warm, indoor receptions to create a truly memorable mood. All weddings are good, but Xmas weddings have an additional magic which we simply love.

So what are we doing in the run-up to Xmas? Albums of course! You’ve all seen our albums and how different they are to everyone else’s. That’s because we’re that much more experienced than other photographers in album design and know that, in order to be truly individual and reflect the changing mood of the wedding, they can’t be designed properly using the mass of cheap template-based software which other photographers use. Our albums take time and effort – often entailing over 100 hours’ work before we are fully satisfied that the album is ready for production. It’s hugely rewarding and is one of the elements which gives us our unique edge over the competition, but it is very, very time-consuming! This year’s unusually busy summer resulted in lots more orders than usual coming in just before the Xmas deadline. Thankfully, by working flat-out, we were able to finish all of them in time and no-one will be disappointed not to get their album by Xmas ( album-manufacturers permitting!).

Usually we we expect then to have time for a breather. Couples from later weddings know their albums won’t be started by the manufacturers until January at the earliest so they tend not to put their orders in until then.

But not this year. We’ve received a mass of orders from clients all trying to avoid price increases which are expected by our album manufacturers after January 1. We’ll work non-stop to complete the orders in time, but it will be a close-run thing and by the time Xmas comes we’ll be more ready than ever to chill-out and relax.

Even more apologies!

Back in July i apologised for not keeping the blog up to date. A combination building work at the studio and other time constarints meant that I had been very lax in posting. But, I assured everyone, the builders had gone and I would be posting regularly from then on….

Ermmm. That was my last post until now, 3 months later! This has been our busiest summer ever and I had simply underestimated the amount of work I had to do. We’re obsessed with keeping up to date with all our clients’ work and never allowing ourselves to fall behind. But in doing so I had to make a decision – keep up to date with the blog or go quietly insane through lack of sleep. Well, the sleep ( and near-sanity) won. But as a result the blog suffered and I simply haven’t been able to post about the super weddings we’ve been doing this summer.

And there have been a lot of them. It’s all my fault, I’m afraid. I made a basic mistake last year when the bookings were coming in fast and furious and I’ve had to work through the consequences over the past few months.

Actually I put some of the blame on the media. There was so much hype on the News and in the papers about how serious the recession was going to be and how many businesses would fold! And in fact I know of several well-established photographers who did have to close down last year. So I chickened out and changed my booking policy. I’ve always been lucky in that we’re oversubscribed and have to turn away about 100 weddings a year. It’s been like that for the past 6 or 7 years now, so what I’ve always done is to ensure that my weddings are spread out throughout the year. I’d never accept more than two bookings a week and only do two concurrently if I really liked the couple and their wedding sounded different in some way. So, with plenty of gaps between weddings I’ve always had plenty of time to ensure that each one gets our special attention ( normally about 100 hours work is involved for each wedding!) and that I can genuinely go to each one fresh and excited, ready to give my all for my clients on the one day when everything is so special to them.

But last year I wasn’t so sure that the oversubscription would last. I panicked and decided that, so long as i really liked the client,that we clearly gelled and that I still wasn’t doing more than two weddings a week, I would simply accept the first 30 wedding enquiries we got. The result – July, August and September have been truly hectic.

With hindsight I can see that I totally over-reacted and need not have worried.  In the end we had to turn away 85 serious booking requests ( some of them from truly lovely couples who we would dearly have loved to cover) because we had met our targets already. We’ve still given our all and the work has been lovely. But we are now completely shattered and looking forward to the much, much quieter winter period.

Which means that – finally – I’ll be able to start getting up to date on the blog. We’ve got a fantastic new venue to tell you about, we’ve got to report on the closure of one of our recommended venues – and we’ve met some sup, dedicated wedding suppliers and want to pass their details on to you. Oh, and of course we want to tell you about some of the great weddings we’ve done this year.

Hopefully next week I’ll start getting you all up to date.

Apologies

The whole point of a blog is that it’s kept up to date so that regular readers know what’s going on at Aurora Studio and can stay in touch with events. I know that a lot of our clients ( and some of our competitors!) visit the blog regularly to glean useful tidbits of information and to help plan their own wedding. It’s what we’re here for.

The last two months I’ve been really bad at keeping up to date on theblog, and I’ve got to apologize. We knew we were having building work done at Aurora and so planned our work to give us a slack period over May. This gave us less to report on the Blog anyway. But then the builders arived and chaos ensued! Two months of scaffolding, a leaky roof and dust everywhere are now behind us, thank God, and with a bit of luck – and time- we will get straight again! Our new store room is complete and finished, which means that Carole’s office no longer has boxes, frames and folios piled from floor to ceiling and her computer space is now clear and tidy, allowing her to design her fantastic wedding albums without fear of triggering an avalanche of boxes once again.

So, thanks to this choas and the fact that those weddings we did over this period had largely asked that their weddings weren’t mentioned on-line,  the blog has become somewhat neglected. Apologies again.

This whole year is turning out to be quite an odd one for us. After covering over 300 weddings since we started the business we thought we’d seen it all and knew roughly what to expect. But not this year. And it started early on. One January Saturday  we could have filled  a dozen times over and yet didn’t receive a single wedding enquiry for the whole of rest of the month. Then there was the weather at the start of the year. It was fantastic! After rain on virtually every Saturday last year we’ve found that all our weddings this year have been completely dry. Even the January and February weddings were dry and bright, allowing the couples to have at least some of their photography outside.

But probably the biggest ‘oddity’ this year is in the couples we have booked! I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course. It’s not the couples themselves – it’s the spectrum they represent. Our youngest are both under 20 – our eldest have grandchildren in their 20′s! The smallest wedding we’re covering has 13 guests – our largest has 900 guests sitting down for the wedding breakfast and expects well over 1000 for the Cathedral ceremony. Some couples have been together for years, others have had a whirlwind romance.  For some of our couples the cost of the photography represents only a tiny fraction of the cost of the whole wedding: for others it is the biggest single outlay of the day. We’ve got the lavish and the minimalist, the laidback and the tightly controlled. I could go on…… but the thing is – this is what we love about weddings!

No two couples are the same and the variety of personalities and approaches make weddings fantastic, vibrant and exciting places. Both Carole and I gave up other secure and well-paid professions to start Aurora Studio and do what we love – helping others to get the most out of their wedding day and giving them memories they will cherish. It’s more of a passion than a job for us and a passion which is constsntly revitalised by every wedding that we cover.

The Recession Bites!

Sad news recently. It seems like no-one is immune from the effects of the recesion. Naively I had hoped that the recession might do some good in the industry. There are lots of new ‘wedding photographers’ flooding the market at the moment.Usually with no insurance, poor equipment, inadequte backup and no skill these wannabes are undercutting the true professionals, providing poor service and giving the photography industry a bad name. I had hoped that the recession would force these poorer photographers out of business and allow those of us who truly care about our clients and the service we provide to establish new industry standards for others to live up to in the future.
But the recession is clearly not so discriminating. Over the past few months I’ve seen many such part-timers fall by the wayside – but I’m also witnessing the demise of some truly good, conscientious and skilled professionals who simply don’t deserve the bad times that they have encountered. The photographer whom I most admired and aspired to be an equal to when I first started the business 11 years ago has now closed down. A nother who has one more awards and accolades – both nationally and Internationally than most people could dream of, is on the edge of bankruptcy. Another has had to sell his separate home and premises in order to downsize in an attempt to stay solvent. Bad things are happening out there! These are photographers at the height of their skills, who exhibit nothing but the highest level of professionalism and who are guaranteed to give their clients nothing bu the best. Their demise is leaving a gaping skills/professionalism hole in our industry!

The good news is that at Aurora we’ve not really been touched by these events. Although telephone enquiries are noticeably down, bookings for 2010 are exactly where we would expect/hope for them to be at this time of the year, whilst 2011 is booking up way ahead of schedule.

We had a big debate at the start of the recession, asking ourselves whether we should cut quality in order to cut costs and prices. But though we were tempted, we couldn’t do it! We’ve built our reputation on not only our photographic skill but on our obsession with the quality and the uniqueness of our finished albums. We average over 100 man-hours per wedding, ensuring that absolutely EVERYTHING is as perfect as we can make it. That is the quality our clients demand. We could buy the same software as other photographers and produce cheap’n'cheerful albums for a third of the cost. But they wouldn’t be Aurora albums and we wouldn’t get the fantastic job-satisfaction or the fierce loyalty from our clients that has kept us above our competitors. Thankfully, this seems to have been the right decision for us. Our order books have held firm and the future for us continues to look rosy. But we can’t help feeling for those good guys who have been less fortunate. These are sad times indeed!

Recession – What Recession?

It’s the Wedding Fair season now and it’s always interesting each year for us to see vendors from other areas of the ‘industry’ and have a natter with them about life and the universe.

This year has been particularly revealing. There’s really only been one topic of conversation – the recession and how it’s affecting business. And there’s no doubt that it is – badly. In the past few months several long-established businesses have had to close. Several dress-designers in the area are now no more; many photographers have ceased trading all together or have had to become part-timers, earning most of their income through a new ‘proper’ job; cake makers have been hit badly and even some of the wedding venues are saying that their bookings are down. If you go round any of the wedding fairs you’ll be struck by how many of the vendors are now trying to stay afloat by expanding their ranges. Cake makers are now also florists and stationers, car drivers are doubling up as videographers or even as photographers. And everyone is trying to undercut everybody else.

So, good news for couples married? I’m afraid not. Quite the opposite in fact. Flowers or stationery offered by the cake-lady will almost certainly be hugely inferior to those offered by the specialists and undercutting prices will mean that corners have to be cut. Reduced profit margins are actually increasing the likelihood of businesses folding – and ultimately it is the unfortunate bride who was looking for a bargain who suffers.

But within the general gloom there are notable successes. Those who have built their reputation on customer care and value for money ( don’t confuse this with ‘cheap’ – ‘cheap is almost never value for money!) are thriving. Our favourite haidresser/make-up artist, Kirby, is going from strength to strength – and the best reception venues, such as Branston Hall, Hemswell Court and Elsham Hall are inundated with enquiries and taking bookings like never before.

And us, how has Aurora been affected by the recession? Thankfully, not at all. We had a wobble in our enquiries last November, immediately after the credit crunch, but once people got over the initial worries then the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. We are exactly on-line for our 2010 bookings, whilst 2011 bookings are going through the roof. In fact, we have even more bookings for 2011 than we have for 2010. It looks like being a record year for us and if present booking trends continue we will be booked up at least 12 months in advance!

People are clearlybeing more careful with their money. Time and again they are telling us thata they’re not inviting quite as many people as they had intended, or they’re not having a videographer, or as many flowers, or they’re making the invitations themselves. But the important things – the venue, the dress and the photography – are somehow even more important to them now. Adam and Louise, who booked with us recently, put it quite succinctly when they said, ‘ What use is it having 150 guests, if they all complain because the food was poor or the place was dirty? We’d rather have a dearer venue and 60 guests all saying how fantastic it all was.’ The same goes for the photographer – what use is it saving money on a cheaper photographer if the photos are so bad you’d never want to look at them?

I’ve got no doubt the recession will be disasterous for some businesses connected with weddings. But lets hope that with people thinking like Adam and Louise, then those who suffer are those who really don’t deserve to succeed. Everyone within the industry knows their are elements which need weeding out. I just hope that market forces continue to target the poorer vendors and that the truly good guys within the business don’t get caught in the cross-fire.

Aurora in China

O.K, the piccy above is s napshot. There’s a reason for this  which I’ll explain in a minute. But first i want to apologize to those of you who have been trying to contact us recently but have not got past the answer-phone or unanswered emails. This year has been our busiest ever – too busy in fact and we’re going to cut back on our workload next year – and by the end of summer we were almost completely exhausted. We believe that people shouldn’t have to wait long for their albums and so we always work long hours to complete them as quickly as we can. But with all but one of our clients this year choosing either of our top two album packages this has meant us spending about 100 hours per album before it reaches the quality we demand. So we’ve been pretty shattered. Hence the need for a holiday – and a three week gap between weddings in October provided just the perfect opportunity. And October is th best time to visit China.

I’m not going to bore you with endless holiday stories and pictures. China’s an amazing place and completely blew our minds. The people are kind and welcoming, the food is fantastic (well, most of it- the dish of offal we ordered by mistake was a definite no-no), and the building work is absolutely everywhere. The country’s growth-rate is beyond anything we can comprehend in this country and China is now a whole series of contradictions between the old, poor China and the new, very rich China.

Being the sad people we are, we can never leave wedding photography behind us and so we were keen to discover something about how things are done in the Orient. Chinese wedding photography is very different from that in the U.K. They have a whole day of formal, studio photography before the wedding. Everyone dresses in their wedding clothes and poses for hours in a stiff, formal style. On the wedding day itself there is also MUCH more time set aside for photography and we saw many brides having their photos taken well into the night on the Shanghai harbour-side. And this is where we met the lovely Jessie Wang and her new husband. A bride and groom, right in front of the famous Aurora building – it was a cliche opportunity too good to miss. The style is more traditional Chinese than  Aurora Studio and the quality is impaired by the holiday camera we took with us, but we still enjoyed photographing them and hopefully we’ll have given them a wedding memory they’ll look back on with affection.

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