Here’s one more thing to feel guilty about: are you contributing to the negative body image of brides?
Liene Stevens of Splendid Communications put into words something I have wondered about. How are the brides on your website influencing your booking rate? From Liene’s article Online Marketing and the Plus-Sized Bride
Journal of Health Psychology published a study* of Australian brides-to-be and their pre-wedding weight concerns. The study included 879 brides with an average age of 26 recruited from five different Australian-based bridal websites. Here are some excerpts from their research:
75% of the brides intended to exercise more and eat in a more healthy manner.
35% planned to cut out fat and carbohydrates from their diet.
43% planned to use an indoor tanning bed before the wedding day.
52% planned to undergo teeth whitening treatments.
Over 1/3 of the brides had been encouraged to lose weight for their wedding by someone else…
I have plus-sized brides on my site. I book plus sized brides. I know how to break through the insecurity and they trust me to make them look fantastic. AND their money spends as well as size 2 money.
So when you are blogging, creating a sample album, or imagining your ideal client ask yourself this: what do they truly look like, and how important is that to you?
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5 Comments at "Photography and the Plus-Sized Bride"
this is a great reminder to us all. I was an ‘above average’ bride myself and certainly appreciated the sensitivity with which this was dealt. so well was it managed that it’s only now, looking back, i realise how much was done to make sure i was in flattering positions and that my best features were always front and centre.
I honestly don’t concern myself with a bride’s size when thinking about if they belong on the blog/website. I look at the image and if I like it, then it goes up.
Also my ideal client has nothing to do with their looks, size etc. It has to do with personality. I want clients that are goofballs, like to have fun and laugh. I also really love clients that are really into each other.
I have a few “plus” size brides on my site. I honestly have to say though, most of my brides aren’t plus size. Not sure why and most of my potential clients aren’t either. So, if a photographer isn’t really booking that type of client then how can they put those images on their site?
I’m not a size 2 photographer. Why would I expect my brides to be? Just not realistic.
We definitely get all sizes and shaped brides (and I’m in Australia).
A few recent comments have been made to me to the effect that, “you only ever seem to shoot beautiful people”.
Well, no we don’t. As Raylene has pointed out, a lot of the skill of photography is in posing to highlight and flatter.
I think most people are used to seeing themselves and their friends portrayed in a pretty average way in photographs (especially via social networking sites) and think that’s what a photo & photographer will always do to them!
Maybe another aspect to this is – beyond all the participants of a wedding, we definitely concentrate on the bride herself in our advertising, blogs, websites. They are made to feel that they will be the centre of attention.
If every wedding photographer on the planet concentrated on grooms they might feel just a teensy bit body conscious too.
I was a plus size bride and I think my photographer did a pretty good job taking my pictures, but now that I am reading about all of this, I do think that if I had maybe talked a little big before the wedding about how I wanted to be photographed there would have been a lot more pictures that I liked.
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