This post is special to me. Sure, it’s very exciting to be featured in a magazine! But this isn’t just any feature. This symbolizes something much bigger in my business. We hear from so many photographers who are just distraught that they aren’t hitting certain goals fast enough. Maybe it’s booking their top package or shooting at a certain venue… but for a lot of them, they get frustrated because they aren’t featured in a magazine. For those of you who struggle with this…. let me tell you a little story.
My FIRST magazine feature was a BIG DEAL!!! Probably a little bigger than it should have been! A certain magazine selected one of my weddings to be featured in print during my 2nd year in business and I told EVERYONE!!! Then one day FedEx delivered a package from that magazine company and I knew what it was! I had heard that when you get featured in this magazine, they send you several copies AND they send copies to your bride too!! I ripped open the package and frantically flipped through the pages as fast as I could to find the feature, and I found ….. nothing. It wasn’t there. Later that afternoon I got an email from my bride who was so upset because she told her entire family about the feature, and they all got copies and it wasn’t there. Their pictures were no where to be found. It was devastating. The magazine dropped the feature last minute… it was so last minute that their shipping department still sent us copies even though we weren’t included in it. What. A. Mess.
But you know what it taught me early on in my business?? Magazine features can’t be the holy grail of my business. I don’t run my business for magazine features!! I have a much deeper purpose behind what I do and why I do it. This was my FIRST experience with a magazine and let me tell you, I quickly learned not to put my hope and feelings of accomplishment into something like this!!
So fast forward a year or two… I started shooting some destination weddings and I REALLLLLLY wanted to have a wedding in Destination I Do magazine! Why? Because I loved it and it was always on the shelves at Target, and I just wanted to have that experience! I wasn’t obsessed with this desire like I would have been a couple of years prior, but it was definitely on my wish list! So, I started submitting…. and submitting… and submitting. 6 Years of rejections went by and it never happened. SIX YEARS. I learned patience on a whole new level with this one! Sometimes in business you just have to wait…. and that’s 100% ok. After almost 9 years in business, I’m finally featured on the pages of Destination I Do magazine and you know what? It’s SWEETER now than it ever would have been 6 years ago, because I had to be patient!!! Totally worth the wait!
I’m so excited that the sweet editor at Destination I Do loved Kyle and Erin’s Montmoreau-Saint-Cybard, France wedding as much as we do!!!!! If you haven’t see their beautiful destination wedding you can view it HERE!! Congrats Erin and Kyle! Your beautiful, unique vision for your amazing destination wedding is now being used as inspiration for brides all over the country!!!! You can find this issue on news stands now!
Here are just a few FAVORITES from this stunning European wedding at the incredible Les Mirandes!
Thanks for reading!
— Katelyn
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