Rangefinder Magazine
March 2005

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Cathcart Photography: One-Hour Weddings by Larry Singer

In the promotional, two-and-a-half-minute video on the web site for Cathcart Photography in Estes Park, Colorado, Aaron Cathcart is shooting the formal wedding party pictures in front of a church—while his dad, Steve, helps pose the group—when an insect flies down the front of one of the bridesmaids’ gowns.

Noticing that something has gone awry, Aaron says, “That’s a Kodak moment” as he takes a couple steps to his left and preserves this unexpected event on film.

While the bride and another member of the wedding party try to assist the panicky bridesmaid, the spontaneous event, as Aaron captured it, appears as a still image during the video. Aaron’s photograph, in terms of storytelling value, is nothing short of magnificent.

Oddly, this small occurrence perfectly demonstrates the Cathcarts’ creative and imaginative ability to turn a possible disaster into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and then to make the most of it.

Steve Cathcart, 60, the originator of, and driving force behind Cathcart Photography was raised in Oberlin, Kansas, where his dad was a photographer. “Unfortunately,” Steve says, “he passed away before I learned anything from him. I was more interested then in cars, motorcycles and girls.”

After moving 30 miles north to Nebraska, he was a police officer for a number of years and wound up a captain in the fire department.

Because of his odd schedule, Steve had 20 days a month off. Photography was his hobby, and one summer he decided to shoot a couple of weddings so he could buy a new camera.
Steve began his professional photography career on February 29, 1972, and booked two weddings the same day. “Before that summer was over,” he says, “I think I had done 12 weddings, and it just snowballed from there.”

In 1990, after years spent harboring a deep love for Colorado, Steve sold his studio in Nebraska and headed west.

“When my sons and I first moved out here, we stopped in Loveland for a year,” he said. “Then I thought, I’m going to move up to Estes Park, just to see what it’s like and to be able to say I’d lived in the mountains. That was 12 years ago, and I’ve been up here ever since.”

When he arrived in Estes Park, it occurred to Steve that if he was going to survive as a wedding photographer, he had to do something to set himself apart from the other seven photographers already well established in the rather small town.

“I had to do something to get cash flow quickly, and I wanted to get into a different niche than the rest of our competition,” Steve explains, “so we started including the negatives (in the wedding package) along with the photographs. We’d send our film to the lab, they’d process it, and we’d put the proofs in a preview album and give it to the bride and groom with a written copyright release.” This allowed the bridal couple to make all the reprints their hearts desired.

Weddings by the Hour
The Cathcarts also tried something else to set them apart from their competition: charging for weddings by the hour.

Cathcart Photography has a half-hour package, “But,” Steve says, “we don’t do many of those.”

Cathcart Photography also advertises a 15-minute wedding on its web site, but, as Steve says, “Even if we go out on an elopement deal, the minister usually talks longer than that, so we don’t do many of those either.

“All the other photographers were shooting weddings with a four-hour minimum time requirement,” Steve says, and all these big weddings were booked six months or a year in advance. They weren’t going after the two-hour, the one-hour or the 30-minute weddings. These are the people that call you close to the wedding date if they decide to get married in a hurry,” he continues, “and they may only want an hour of coverage. If not for one-hour weddings” he admits, “my studio would not have survived.”
The idea of weddings by the hour didn’t occur at one time, however: It evolved slowly.

“When I was in Nebraska, we had the same problem all the other photographers did. We had a two-hour wedding package and then we jumped to a four-hour. Often, the bride and groom would want us for two-and-a-half hours or three hours, and we didn’t have a package to fill that need. I’ve studied wedding price lists for 32 years from other photographers, and they’re complicated. We just wanted to make it user friendly.

“Our price list reads: ‘One-hour, continuous digital photographic coverage for $525.’ What you get is an unlimited number of images created on as many CDs as necessary. You get a written copyright release included. Shipping and handling is included. We add in the state sales tax, and the deposit is $300.”
Steve does most of his bookings over the phone because only 20 percent of his weddings come from Colorado.

In keeping with his customer-friendly philosophy, Steve’s pricing, even with his 12-hour package, stays right at $525 per hour. For the rare half-hour wedding, he divides the $525 hourly fee in half.

While Steve was in survival mode after first starting his business, he realized he needed to cut his expenses to the bone, as well as shoot weddings other photographers were ignoring. If this meant limiting his advertising to the bare basics, so be it.

“We have two little ads in a brochure for the Stanley Hotel and the Lake Shore Lodge,” Steve says, “and, along with our web site, that’s about the only advertising we do.

“We’re not in the Yellow Pages,” he continues, “because we don’t advertise any more than we have to.” Instead, Steve relies on referrals from ministers, florists, wedding coordinators and other vendors.

“We make our living by everybody referring people to us. It impresses people when we tell them we’re not in the phone directory. It works well for us because everybody else is putting big, big ads in the Yellow Pages and paying a lot of money each and every month.”

Steve’s lack of a Yellow Pages presence also subtly gives prospective clients the impression that Steve is so successful, he doesn’t need to advertise.

Extras Available
When he first arrived in Colorado, Steve admits, “I thought I had to get down on Main Street and get a storefront like the other photographers.” Shrewdly, he realized that really wasn’t necessary and started working out of his house. After two months he realized he didn’t need a traditional studio. “When people come to the mountains, they want to be outside,” Steve says. “We’ve done winter weddings where they’ve come to us from Vegas and wound up on snowshoes on a frozen lake.”

Steve realized many of his out-of-state customers wouldn’t know where to get reprints from their negatives and CDs, so he and his sons, Aaron and David, worked out a deal with the DigiGraphics photo processing lab. A new branch of DigiGraphics, called DigiGraphics ImageOut, would provide Steve with a jewel case for each of his CDs with a price list for enlargements included. The lab also gives Steve free CDs for his weddings with a 30-second commercial for DigiGraphics ImageOut strategically inserted at the beginning of each disc.

Steve also arranged that clients who want albums and frames can get them online through bridesincor
porated.com/.

The Cathcart College of Wedding Knowledge
In an effort to teach the current, as well as the next generation of wedding photographers the Cathcart method of success, the Cathcarts began offering a home study seminar on eight DVDs or four VHS tapes for $299. The Cathcarts say it will “enhance your existing photography business” or help you “start a business from the ground up.”

In the course the Cathcarts pass on their secrets of: surviving without Yellow Pages ads, learning how to stay well known in the community, cutting $55,000 off your film processing and printing bills, operating a photography business from home with no studio space or equipment, shooting everything on location, shooting digital and film at weddings, and marketing and promotional strategies.

The Cathcarts’ learn-at-home wedding photography course includes, in addition to the tapes and DVDs:

• A binder with 39 examples of contracts, price lists, stationary, business cards, lead sheets and time sheets.
• Their personal trade secrets, shooting techniques, tips on developing people skills, and a list of resources, suppliers and associations.
• The lowdown on how they operate totally differently and set themselves apart from their competition.
• A video of the Cathcarts shooting a large wedding, a small wedding and an engagement session, as well as a “talk & sell” session with a potential client.

Clicking
When asked if there was one photographic philosophy that, more than any other, has helped his business grow and prosper, Steve Cathcart didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the question before he answered: “My dad used to say, and I don’t know if he made it up or heard it somewhere and adopted it, that you have to click with the people before you click the shutter. As far as I’m concerned, he couldn’t have been more right.”

Cathcart Photography’s web site is www.cathcartphoto.com/.

Larry Singer is a former newspaper writer, photographer and artist now living in Lauderhill, Florida. He has taught photography in Florida and Denver and now has an obsession with hearts. He can be contacted at his email address: rangefinderwriter@yahoo.com/.