The History and Future of Lifetime Images
As a teenager, Steve Schlesinger was bitten by the photography bug in high school. He worked part time jobs at an ice cream parlor just to pay for photographic gear. Serving on both the yearbook and newspaper staff as a photographer his interest evolved into portraiture. In high school he started to do senior portraits for his classmates, and as a freshman in college he photographed his first wedding. It was a dream of his to start a wedding photography business and with the advice of a local pro he decided to forgo the conventional photography trade schools and get a four year degree in business administration from San Diego State University.
After college Steve developed an interest in computers along with photography. Though digital photography was looking more like a reality in the mid 1990's it had yet to be realized. It was the era of film's last stand. At the time there were 160 different types of film each with its own characteristics. Digital cameras capable of photographing a wedding were still a few years away.
The first few years
Lifetime Images was in the forming phases in 1996 and by 1997 the first company filed for a DBA. The first wedding for Lifetime Images occurred in 1997 and though they were few in number they were each significant growth opportunities. Two things moved the company along in the first few years. The first was signing up a couple key Mormon weddings. From this many others followed over the next couple of years. It gave us the opportunity to hone our craft and build up a portfolio with attractive bridal couples. The second was establishing the www.LifetimeImages.com website.
1999-2002, The first blogger, and the first ex-blogger
As a novel idea Steve took a few images from certain wedding and put them up on the website and wrote little stories about them. What happened, who showed up, what funny things occurred. This was the first blog long before there was such things as a blog. The popularity of these things really pushed the wedding photography into the limelight and with the years 2000 and 2001 there were so many weddings that occurred in that timeframe that Steve could no longer hold down a fulltime job and run a photography business. In July he walked into work and gave his two week notice. They accepted it with the notion that he would be back. Fortunately this never happened. Less than two months later was September 11th 2001 and Steve felt like his timing couldn't have been worse. There was so much work to be done and the blogs took up far too much time that was needed to be spent on the business. There was supposed to be a sense of irony and humor to the blog stories but alas brides came along demanding that they be featured as well. It became too much of a distraction so it was abandoned.
2003, the first digital albums.
Though film still played a critical role with the company, a few changes were occurring in the industry and along with the new breed of brides. Their expectations of what wedding photography should look like started to change. The bridal magazines started pushing a new style of wedding photography toward the end of the 1990s called Photojournalism. It was less emphasis on traditional portraiture and more emphasis on candid images. By 2003 nearly every bride who walked in asked for it by name, The problem was however as the style started to change, the old, boring traditional albums remained. Though there were a variety of more interesting images, the old standards seemed to always find its way into the bridal albums. These albums did nothing to showcase the evolving photographic style.
In 2003 Steve laid out his first digital flush mount album. It was 30 sides, unconventional, lovely, and took three months to finish. What was interesting was that the pages were designed around the images. What this meant was each image was selected, cropped and sized to the page. This feeble first attempt with crude Photoshop skills and a lack of understanding of the concept of album design was ironically years ahead of it's time. Cheesy special effects were downplayed, the layouts weren't cluttered and for the most part the album still holds up well today.
2003 Awards. Publications and notoriety
Lifetime Images received accolades and honors with images that scored well at an International wedding photography conventions. From 2003 to 2005 Our work was featured in bridal magazines such as Modern Bride, Wedding Bells as well as LA Confidential magazines. All in all it sounds more prestigious than it really was, there was a lot of background work to get prints ready for print competition as well as establishing contacts with certain bridal magazines. Often there was requirement that you have to be a current advertiser to be considered. This was setting the stage for moving into West LA upscale weddings. When we finally "arrived" in 2005 we were turned off by some greedy and unscrupulous wedding coordinators and choose to focus back on the middle class weddings that we had been serving all along. It was a wise decision because as the economy fell apart in 2008 those wedding photographers who catered to high end weddings suffered the most. With core values on hard work, creativity, ingenuity and a special emphasis on families and relationships over the hot trend of the day our style was established.
2005, the Elegance Package
The year 2005 was exciting due to the introduction of the elegance package. Up this point traditional albums were our only offering. The Elegance Package was the first package to offer a magazine album, but just to be safe it also came with a traditional album. The package was a huge hit, though people were far more excited with the magazine albums than the traditional albums. By this point digital cameras were coming to each wedding though presenting clients with the thousands of resulting images was a larger problem. At first we shot the same amount of film as we normally did, but after a while we used the film camera less and less. When one of the last film cameras died at a wedding and the manufacturer was more excited about selling us a new film camera than fixing the old one, the days of film were over for us.
2005-2008 The era of the digital flush mount album.
It was almost like someone had turned off a big light switch, the days of traditional albums were over nearly instantly. You simply couldn’t give them away anymore. Thus, we stopped showing them as a viable option. We had been evaluating flush mount albums to offer to our clients since 2003. The first year or two was a real learning experience. They had some very serious quality issues, one actually tore in half at the binding when we opened it to check it out before giving it to a client. The underlying problem is one that plagues this industry to this day. There is still many very poorly made albums available with the notion that this is what the public demands because they are cheap to acquire. Poor quality albums that cost less had always been an option, one that we never explored. We have always been about quality albums that can go the distance of a lifelong marriage. Thus, we started scrutinizing what was offered. Since 2005 the number of flush mount album manufactures shot through the roof. Our concern is that as fast as they showed up in the market they could exit just as easily. This would present two large problems. The first would be to offer an album that we could no longer acquire. The second and even larger issue was that there would be no way to repair an album of a company that was out of business. Thus, we learned a lot about quality and longevity of flush mount albums. Many of the cutting edge, or neat things about the albums are the very things that make them to damage and decay. We share this knowledge with clients who meet us for consultations.
2008 The JET Album design process
Typically wedding photographers find inspiration from watching famous wedding photographers talk about their work. We instead found one of our greatest sources of inspiration from a Romanian flooring contractor. Completely unrelated to wedding photography this gentleman's work ethic was simply amazing, and gave us the clue that we needed to make the last piece of the puzzle fit. The American work ethic really wasn't dead, just downplayed by terms like "Works smarter not harder." So, our marching orders were to "work smarter AND harder. " From this the JET Album design process evolved. It was a major about face for Lifetime Images. It was essentially the opposite of how we had previously designed albums . We honestly thought there would be more resistance to it, but when we explained how and why we made the change people embraced it. When we actually put it to work we had happier clients than ever and were turning out much better work in a much shorter timeframe.
The great recession of 2009
We unfortunately know far too many people who had lost far too much in the great recession of 2009 such as careers, homes, and marriages. As bad as things got we counted ourselves fortunate. Whoever tells you that weddings are recession proof clearly wasn't a wedding vendor in 2009. Places that had two year waiting lists for a Saturday wedding reception were suddenly laying off staff. Everybody had less work and whatever work they could find was for lower rates in 2009. In a very strange way their was a small silver lining behind the very dark clouds. We had significantly less work than in previous years and though we struggled financially from time to time we kept afloat. What we did do however was used the downtime to catch up on our work and plan the final stages of our efficiency. It was the "working smarter" half of the "Work smarter AND harder." We introduced economical packages such as the Fusion packages and the Solana Package that really set the pace for the rebound.
2010 & Beyond-Uptick
We were excited to kick off 2010 with one of the largest wedding booking years we saw in years. So many of the pieces finally came together. We made huge investments in computer hardware and systems. We had spent weeks working on writing custom scripts for repetitive tasks. This brought us no money at a time when we certainly could have used it, but we capitalized on our investment in 2010. Our core client base, the middle class embraced us during the time frame the upper class abandoned the high end wedding photographers . The increased efficiency also led to some other exciting new discoveries that brought us full circle to the first flush mount album we designed. What if we could design a wedding album every bit as custom yet twice as stellar in reasonable period of time? We were able to do things that more than 95% of the wedding photography studios simply couldn't do. Sure many photographers are able to layout an album in a few days as long as they could shove nearly uncorrected images into prepackaged templates and offer truly uninspiring album layouts in the name of speed and efficiency. It's one thing to use a website to grandstand on a blog about how great we are. It seems that today brides are over it. They are also over the 'friend of a friend with a good camera' and being harassed by used car salesmen sales tactics. We instead have a four step strategy.
#1. Use this website to tell the story about what we do.
#2. Communicate the same story in person when you meet with us, set reasonable expectations, and give clients time and space to make their own decision.
#3. Spell out everything clearly in the contract
#4. Live up to our end of the bargain.
We are fortunately in an industry that vast majority of our competitors can't follow this simple four step plan. The often changes from step on to two, the contracts are scarce on details about what the studio will do but spell out clearly how and when they expect to be paid. Step four is about accountability. We are accountable, when people hire us they expect results not excuses.
Where will "Work smarter AND harder" take us in the future? We can't wait to find out!