After watching the movie wedding crushers, I got obsessed and thought of giving it a try. I waited for the right opportunity and when it did I seized it at once. It was disguised as wedding photography. I had just graduated from college with a paper in my hand and no job. All I would do was watch movies and going on missions with Agent Bauer. Then I watched Wedding Crushers and a thought struck me. Why not crush weddings for profit? Quite weird isn’t it?

I had always enjoyed photography from my childhood and had taken a kin interest in wedding photography in Zimbabwe. I had also made a few hundreds from stock photography as well. I attended my last wedding with an invitation card that year and what I saw struck me. There were more than three money making opportunities at that wedding event. I was so sure that it was an opportunity with potential to be duplicated at any Zimbabwe wedding event.

Zimbabwe Wedding photography crisis

Ever since that wedding, I have seen one major crisis on contracted wedding photographers. I have nothing against professional photographers but Iam stating facts. The Zimbabwe wedding photographer when covering the event has only one mandate, to please the soon to be husband and wife. He knows who is buttering his bread and he will try by all means to capture the best shots of the two. The rest of the crowd doesn’t matter save for a few photos of their parents and lucky relatives. Eighty percent all wedding photos in Zimbabwe I have seen focus on the bride and the groom. Nobody cares about the crowd. Nobody cares about taking a shot of an aunt smiling with joy as the two kiss. The photographers know how important those moments are and how great those shots can be but they know the bride won’t be pleased with them as much as she would be pleased with the kissing photo or simply the photo of the cake. Those moments are forgotten and what remains is heap of photos showing only two people at a function attended by sometimes more than 500 people. The photos will not tell a story. These people will have no memory of the event since they will have no photo captured most likely. This was the first crisis I identified at almost all wedding events in Zimbabwe.

The second crisis was for the honored guests. These are ferried to a flowery place were photos of them with the groom and bride are taken. They spend an hour or more posing for photos sometimes in the burning sun and if they are lucky they will see a few of those photos posted on the public profiles of the newlyweds social media platforms like Facebook and twitter. Unlike the first batch, these have actual photos taken but they never see them again save for a few who will visit the newlyweds at their home.

The third crisis had to do with the food. I have seen that in most Zimbabwean Weddings, food is served when people are dying of hunger. Some may long for a bottle of coke or ice cream for the baby but will find none, especially if the venue is detached from the city life. Sometimes drinks run out completely during lunch. I saw that and saw a way out. Fishing in someone else’s fish pond was the answer instead of creating my pool. All I needed was a good product. A speaker once said in my hearing, when the product is good, you don’t need marketing and I believe him.

The opportunity – Zimbabwe wedding photography

When I saw how lonely these two groups of people can be at a wedding I fell in love with them. I fell in love with the audience and knew I could do something about it. I didn’t have a camera but I knew a person I could borrow from. I bought a canon instant printer and borrowed that camera. We offered the audience the attention they were not being given and the result they had to wait for months or years to see. We began taking photos of the audience at double the fee of normal photography but we showed them love and affection. We gave them their photos immediately. If their children craved for something, we had chips, juices, ice-cream and chocolates stacked in my friend’s car to calm them down till lunch. I was shocked at the response even though we had priced the products above the normal market price. That first weekend you may not believe it but we made in excess of $300.00. People loved the pictures and we were only limited by the fact that we had one camera.

We used the money to buy two digital cameras and the next week we were on again. All we had to do was keep our eyes open about the next wedding. We started by asking friends if they had a friend or relative wedding. The next weekend we made almost double that amount and bought another printer. It was interesting and at one point we made so much money that I was sure we had beat the contracted cameramen to their game. We were stilling their show and their money. As a token of appreciation, we would take five photos of parts of the wedding the two weren’t able to see from the high table and gave them as a gift. That is how I bought my first cameras, both the still and digital camera.

It went on for a few months until we got our first jobs. I later own wined the business idea to my young brother and he soldiered on for a year during weekends. Then a lot of people realized how we were making money and joined in but most of them did poorly. They didn’t give the crowd the affection, attention and care they required. They didn’t see how lonely they could be with all the cameras and attention being focused on one person. They somehow killed the idea but a few got it. It was an opportunity that was surely not going to be around for years but one that could be used to raise money for the big thing. I knew I wasn’t going to crush weddings all my life but I just thought of the past and felt this experience could be worth a share.

To your continued success