A note from Sherry at World’s Best Wedding Photos

Some of the best advice we hear from photographers has nothing to do with cameras, ads, or algorithms. Ben Lau has spent seventeen years photographing weddings across Northern New Jersey, New York City, and the Hudson Valley. He’s known for warm, documentary-style images that favor real moments over posed ones, and he’s a much-loved educator for other photographers. In this guest piece, Ben reflects on the relationships that have built his business, and why they rarely look like marketing at all. So here we share his words of wisdom "The Job Isn't The Opportunity.The Room Is."

Every few months, someone asks me what the best marketing strategy is for a wedding photographer. They expect me to talk about Google Ads, SEO, Instagram, networking events, or whatever platform we're all pretending to enjoy this week. And to be fair, I've done all of those things. I still do. Marketing matters — people have to know you exist before they can hire you.

But if I'm honest, when I look back over the last seventeen years, almost none of the biggest opportunities in my career came from marketing. They came from rooms.

It took me a long time to realize the job and the opportunity are rarely the same thing. Most of us look at an assignment and immediately start evaluating the job itself: How much does it pay? Will it look good in my portfolio? Is it worth giving up a Saturday? Those are fair questions, and I've asked every one of them myself.

But I've also always paid attention to everyone in the room, and I've always felt lucky to get to do this for a living. Maybe it comes from growing up working service jobs, where you learn quickly who's invisible and who's not. Whatever the reason, I've never been particularly good at seeing only the bride and groom. I notice the grandmother who drove six hours to be there, the banquet captain trying to keep dinner on schedule, the DJ who hasn't eaten yet, the bartender making conversation with the uncle who's had one too many. They're all part of the day too.

It wasn't until later that I realized that instinct had become the best marketing I'd ever do.

Some of those people became future clients. Some became creative partners. Some never hired me for anything; you never really know which is which, and I've learned it's usually better not to try. The moment you start assigning value to people based on what they can do for your business, you've already missed the point.

I learned that lesson for the first time at a little girl's first birthday party. Her name was Annabelle, and the party was at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place on Long Island. The kind with a few booths pushed together, balloons taped to the walls, and arcade games that hadn't worked since Y2K. It wasn't glamorous, and it certainly wasn't the kind of job photographers bragged about booking. The job paid around $250, and even seventeen years ago that wasn't life-changing money. By the time I drove from New Jersey, paid the tolls, sat in Long Island traffic questioning every decision that had led me there, and drove home again, the financial upside was modest, to put it kindly. If another photographer had turned that job down, I wouldn't have blamed them.

But once I walked through the door, the job stopped mattering. I wasn't photographing a birthday party anymore; I was photographing a room full of people who loved one another. Grandparents squeezed around tiny tables to watch Annabelle smash her cake. Parents caught up after years apart. Cousins ran laps around the restaurant while every adult pretended someone else was responsible for stopping them. It was loud, chaotic, completely unremarkable to anyone outside that room, and deeply important to everyone inside it.

I photographed that day the way I would have photographed a wedding, not because I thought it would lead anywhere, but because it mattered to them. That family hired me again. Then another family from the party called. Then another.

Family portraits became engagement sessions. Engagement sessions became weddings. Weddings introduced me to more families, who introduced me to more families, and somewhere along the way I found myself photographing destination weddings for people whose connection to me traced back to a little girl's birthday party at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place in the middle of Long Island. Seventeen years later, that one room has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in business. The opportunity had been there all along; I just hadn't recognized it as one yet.

This lesson showed up again years later, only that time it wasn't about a room full of people; it was about paying attention. Around my tenth year in business, I noticed a caterer had posted a few photographs on Instagram and tagged me. I clicked through and recognized them immediately, as images I'd taken years earlier. They weren't bad, exactly. They'd done their job. But looking at them, I realized they no longer represented the business I knew. Her food had evolved, and my photography had evolved. Neither was well represented in those old photos. I could have liked the post and kept scrolling. Instead, I sent a DM.

We spent a day building a fresh library of images she could use across her marketing, and she started using them almost right away. That year alone, she referred roughly $20,000 worth of weddings to my business. More importantly, that relationship eventually led to my wife being added to a preferred vendor list, and today that partnership generates roughly $100,000 a year in bookings for us.

I don't tell that story to suggest photographers should start giving away work for free; that's the wrong lesson. The opportunity wasn't the photo shoot. It was noticing a problem before anyone asked me to solve it, and investing in a relationship with a creative partner rather than a room full of future clients.

The longer I've been in this industry, the more I think it's less about collecting referrals and more about making other people's jobs easier. When you consistently help the people around you succeed, they remember who was standing beside them when it actually mattered.

Which brings me to my favorite story. I was photographing an event at a venue I've worked with for years; it wasn’t even a wedding, just one of the many events they host throughout the year. While I was upstairs working, a couple touring the property was waiting in the lobby. At some point, they mentioned to the coat check attendant that they were looking for a wedding photographer and asked if she knew anyone she'd recommend. She looked at them and said, "The photographer upstairs is here all the time. We love him. Go talk to him." A few minutes later, they found me. We talked for a while, exchanged information, and eventually they hired me to photograph their wedding. I've laughed about that story for years because it's such a ridiculous way to book a client.

Somewhere out there is a photographer carefully monitoring click-through rates, split-testing ad copy, and trying to shave eighteen cents off their cost per lead. Meanwhile, one of my weddings started because a coat check attendant vouched for me. The more I've thought about it, though, the less ridiculous it seems. I'm fairly certain she's never seen one of my wedding galleries. She probably couldn't tell you which camera systems I use or how I light a reception, and she certainly hasn't spent her breaks comparing my work to other photographers'. What she did know was that she'd enjoyed working with me. We'd spent enough Saturdays in the same building for her to form an opinion. Her opinion had nothing to do with my photography and everything to do with me as a colleague. She knew whether I acknowledged people when I walked in, whether I stayed patient when the timeline changed, whether I treated the staff like coworkers for the day instead of invisible people making the event happen behind the scenes.

I think a lot of us spend too much time trying to identify the "important" people in the room. We naturally gravitate toward owners, directors, planners, and decision-makers because we assume those relationships matter most. Maybe they do. But I've never believed they're the only ones worth investing in. Over the course of a wedding day, I spend just as much time around the banquet captain, the bartender, the valet attendants, the florist hauling buckets through the back door, and the DJ eating the same vendor meal I am, as I do with the venue owner. We're all trying to accomplish the same thing, and it's never made sense to me that one group deserves more respect than another simply because of the name tag they're wearing.

That's also why I hesitate when people call this a networking strategy. If you're kind to people because you're hoping they'll help your business someday, you've turned kindness into a transaction. I don't say hello because someone might refer me, and I don't learn people's names because they might book me a wedding. I do those things because I believe everyone in that room deserves to be seen. Ironically, that's probably exactly why the coat check story happened — she wasn't recommending a photographer; she was recommending someone she enjoyed working with.

Looking back over the last seventeen years, I don't remember my Google Ads budget. I couldn't tell you what my cost per click was in 2018, and I've forgotten which Instagram posts took off and which ones disappeared into the algorithm without a trace. What I do remember is a little girl's birthday party in a hole-in-the-wall pizza place on Long Island, an Instagram notification from a caterer still using photos I'd made years earlier, and a couple who trusted the opinion of the woman working coat check. None of those moments looked like marketing when they happened; they just felt like showing up and paying attention.

I never knew which rooms were full of future clients, which were full of future creative partners, and which were simply full of people I'd never see again. Eventually, I stopped trying to figure it out. I just tried to leave every room a little better than I found it.

In the end, I suppose that turned out to be the best marketing I ever did. Or maybe that's giving marketing too much credit. I don't think the jobs changed my career. I think the rooms did.

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From Sherry

Thank you, Ben, for such a generous and honest piece. Your stories are a lovely reminder that the people who champion our work are often the ones we least expect, and that kindness, patience, and paying attention are never wasted. To every photographer reading this: the next room you walk into might matter more than you think. If you’re looking for a community that celebrates both the art and the business of wedding photography, we’d love to welcome you at World’s Best Wedding Photos.