Wedding venues, valued partners

Queensberry Connects is about the photography, technology, business and relationship skills you need to run a successful wedding and portrait studio. Album marketing and album design are our primary focus but we'll cover anything it takes to succeed in this business. We hope our posts will sometimes amuse you, sometimes inspire you, but always offer something to think about. And we're all busy, so we try to keep it brief. Click here for some suggestions to get you started.

Relationships with local wedding venues are a great way to build a strong wedding and portrait business, and a beautiful display album featuring the venue works well for both parties.

Simon Whitten is a long-standing and valued Queensberry client from Yorkshire in England. His association with the luxury castle hotel Swinton Park is very important to him, and for years his Queensberry sample album has rested on the piano in the drawing room.

When the time came to update it, the question was “with what?”

These days most of his clients tend towards the 14×10 Duo that Simon prefers. But feeling the 14×10 “didn’t quite cut it”, he decided the new display album should be a larger 18×12 Duo (in Denim Leather) instead.

Having covered many great weddings at Swinton Park, his next problem was which one to feature? In the end he decided on a “best of” album featuring three couples/weddings that reflected both his own best work and Swinton Park at various times of the year.

• Sarah and Paul had “a glorious summer wedding in 2006”, with a theme of simplicity and elegance.

• Caroline and Jonathan had a fabulous winter marquee wedding in 2007 (“about minus five degrees Celcius and freezing fog!!”)

• The most recent event was Emmeline and Robin’s beautiful Anglo-Italian spring wedding in 2008.

Simon was tempted to add an Autumn wedding to create a true ‘Four Seasons’ album, but had too much material from the three weddings already selected. (Emmeline and Robin’s own Queensberry album is in twin volumes totaling 98 pages and nearly 300 images.)

Simon feels the result speaks for itself. “It’s a pretty fabulous showcase album and hopefully will do me sterling service at the venue for many years to come.”

Something else that wouldn’t surprise us: brides wanting to upgrade from the 14×10 to the 18×12, so they can have what they saw at the castle.

Click here to view Simon Whitten’s Swinton Park display album.

Click here for Simon’s profile.

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