Episode 41- Luxury Wedding Photographer Anni Graham: Approaching timeless imagery, finding inspiration, and pivoting into a specific niche
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We are so excited for this episode because we have the legendary Anni Graham on the podcast today! Anni is sharing her journey into the wedding photography space, as well as pivoting into shooting intimate elopements & now luxury weddings! Anni has tons of wisdom and incredible advice on how to tell a story and evoke a feeling through your images, as well as finding other ways to gain inspiration and looking outside of the box. If you want to up-level your photography game, pivot into a specific niche, evoke a feeling through your images & create timeless art, you're gonna wanna listen to this episode & take some notes!
EC: Tell us a little bit about how you got started in the industry.
Anni: When I first started, wedding photography wasn’t taken seriously. I was in photo journalism and in 2017, after I got married, I started to see the corolation between photo journalism and wedding photography. I started to really take things full time after that, so I started taking on tons of weddings per year. Now I am able to shoot luxury weddings full time!
EC: Do you feel like you see a shift in wedding photography throughout the years?
Anni: I think honestly the biggest thing I’ve learned in researching about the wedding industry is that there is so much I don’t know. It might feel like there’s trends, which yes we do see them involved, but it all is just the people we follow. I feel like I am known in a specific niche of wedding photography. But also, there are all these other trends that I don’t even know about. I feel like I have a tunnel vision of wedding photography, but there is so much else to it.
EC: What initially drew you to elopements?
Anni: That’s still really where my heart is. What drew me there was when I was planning my wedding, there were so many “should’s”. It felt so far from meaningful to me, and I broke down and told my husband I don’t want to do it. So we ended up having a very intimate elopement in a place that was very meaningful. I ended up doing things my own way and I felt like I had to constantly explain myself the whole way. I wanted to be the photographer for the people who also felt like tradition was something suffocating to them and wanted to do something that felt more meaningful.
EC: What inspires you?
Anni: That is such a hard question to answer because there are so many things that inspire me! I do know that for me, to find inspiration, it’s about what I am doing. I have to have space to have personal shoots each year so I can ask myself “what is it that I want my work to look like or feel like?”. There’s also the everyday moments in life — like baking bread, or making my own almond milk, or gardening. None of this has anything to do with photography, but there is a feeling that I have when I do those things. I’m always after a vision that conveys feeling across the board.
EC: What’s something you’ve learned from doing photography for so long?
Anni: I think something that I am really learning this year, that I have to keep relearning, is that if you want to do something you have to follow through with the steps. My whole life right now is transitioning into luxury wedding photography. I knew what I needed to do to get there, and it’s a lot of updating your website, updating your work, figuring out your ideal client and how to reach out to them, how much do I charge, etc.
We hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as we did! We learned so much from Anni and got so much inspiration from chatting with her.
