Well Ethan im in your neck of the woods except i'm not a student and i'm trying to break into the wedding industry. Would it be too late for the Louisiana market and what are some suggestions that you would have? BTW I shoot with two hc3's and edit with pc premiere pro cs3 and mac fcs 2.

Shaun - I'm probably the last guy you want to get marketing tips from. No really, I suck at it.

We moved to South Louisiana from up around Monroe and Shreveport about 9 months ago and it's just a much different market down here. We still do 80% of our weddings up there.
For us business took off when we began to put some money into advertising. Funny how that works. Email me off list and I'll go into more detail. I don't want to derail this guy's thread.

Well this is all good help guys, sorry about the SD HD format thing, I will just clarify somehow to customers what exactly is happening inside the camera resolution wise and stuff. So I guess me and my friend are going to try to take this on. Once we get our HVX's offer to do a wedding for very cheap, so that we can gather good shots to demo. and he's an amazing flash web designer so we're good to go in that respect.

Just wanted to wish you the best of luck. I started in May 2 years ago and decided to take it seriously... and 1 year later I had 21 weddings booked. We are in a similar market, I'd imagine, so it's completely do-able. I did 1 demo for next to nothing and from there built on. Just be honest with yourself and more importantly with your clients. They will value that! GL!

For sure. There is a guy in my market that advertising HD wedding videos, but I know for a fact he creates his DVD's in iDVD ... which isn't even a professional DVD authoring program (no offense to any iDVD users). But it really aggravates me because the couples that book him don't know any of this.

hey, doug - i started shooting weddings three years ago in may. i started advertising in the knot that same month - made sure i had a website, pricing, and a demo (although it was pretty 'slim')... and i booked 12 weddings that year for $995 up to $1800.

it's totally do-able.

fwiw, i am upgrading from my dvx cams to canon a1's so i can start shooting hd. i was turned off from the hvx because they're even crappier than the dvx in low light AND the cost to shoot hd is pretty ridiculous at this point.

best,
rk