Justin Jacques: Hello everyone, Justin Jacques here from the Wedding Insider Podcast. Today I have Aron Goss, formerly of Calculated Style, now it’s just Aron Goss, right?

Aron Goss: Just Aron now, yeah.

Justin Jacques: Okay, cool. He’s an award-winning photographer from the International Society of Wedding Photographers and Fearless Photographers. Is that right?

Aron Goss: [Agrees]

Justin Jacques: And my favorite award that you’ve won is you’re voted the best photographer in the world by your own mom.

Aron Goss: Yeah, I had to work harder for that. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Justin Jacques: Yeah. Thanks for being here. So let’s get started and just give everyone kind of a background on where you got started in photography and how you ended up being a wedding photographer.

Aron Goss: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been shooting professionally since 2009, early 2009. It’s when I first started actually taking money for gigs. I’ve been shooting forever. I think you get from a lot of people we grew up taking pictures. It’s something we always did. We had film growing up. My dad almost became a photographer. He shot growing up our entire lives, but it wasn’t something he had ever decided to take on as a career. So I’m lucky I was able to do this for a living, I still am.

Justin Jacques: Yeah, yeah.

Aron Goss: Yeah.

Justin Jacques: Cool. So yeah, like how did you end up moving into weddings? Like basically it seems like for a lot of photographers, you do a few friends and then you end up realizing that you can do it on the side, or is that kind of where you moved into when you started to decide that that’s what you wanted to take on as your profession?

Aron Goss: I’ve only really ever been interested in taking pictures of people.

Justin Jacques: Okay, cool.

Aron Goss: I don’t take a lot of pictures of mountains and water and still life. It’s always been people, and just trying to tell [cut audio 00:01:52 ]. Weddings just kind of made sense. Weddings allowed me to tell a story, to shoot people which I’ve always been drawn to, but also to be able to take pictures that mean so much to people, and then pictures that people are going to treasure forever.

I was interested in weddings right from the start. So that’s always been my goal. I really only shoot weddings still. That’s definitely where my passion is, so yeah, I don’t shoot a lot of models and I don’t shoot a lot of babies and families. Well, I have shot some of them, it’s primarily just been for previous clients. Other than that, weddings is probably 95% of my business.

Justin Jacques: Cool. All right, so we’re back. We had some technical issues. We’re just trying to make sure we got the best audio possible, and Aron went and grabbed a different computer, and now we’re going to continue the interview. So we left, yeah, and hopefully, everything comes through what we’re saying.

So we left off just with how can a couple find like an awesome photographer. What should they be looking for when they’re looking for a photographer?

Aron Goss: The big thing for me when I meet a client, I don’t want them coming to me hoping to see more pictures. I’m going to assume that you’ve already gone through a ton of my work online. It’s all up there. I’m happy to share galleries as well if people request it.

When I meet with clients for my meeting, I’m hoping that we’re just feeling each other out personality wise. I want to make sure that I’m the kind of person you want to have around on your wedding day. I know I’m not the perfect photographer for everybody, but I hope that I’m the perfect photographer for the clients that do hire me.

So I want to spend a lot of time with them. I want to get an idea of the personality, of their sense of humor, to see if there’s that comfort level there. That’s really what I would push clients to spend a lot of time doing.

We spend so much time with them on their wedding day in a lot of really intimate moments. I want to make sure you feel completely comfortable and completely trusting when I’m there shooting on your wedding day. It’s funny, I usually spend more time with the bride on her wedding day than the groom will.

Justin Jacques: Yeah.

Aron Goss: You’ve got to love your photographer, and you have to feel completely comfortable that they’re going to be able to handle you, your friends and family the way you want your friends and family to be handled.

Essentially, we’re the only guest at a wedding that isn’t truly invited. We’re just there as a vendor, an important vendor, but just a vendor. So I would want all my clients to know that they feel completely comfortable. If they’re not around and I’m there moving their family around or just interacting with their guests, that they feel comfortable knowing that I’m going to treat them like they are my family as well.

Justin Jacques: Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy, I mean, just having photographer friends and talking to photographers, how many intimate moments you’re there for where you’re there when the bride is putting on her dress. You’re there when her mom sees her for the first time or her dad sees her for the first time, and when the groom sees her for the first time, and all these like really important moments, and you’re sometimes the only other person there for some of those moments.

Yeah, it is. I think having that personality match is super important, especially with somebody that you’re going to be with all day long and working in such an intimate, I guess, way.

Aron Goss: Really, absolutely.

Justin Jacques: So where do you think that if brides and grooms are just kind of starting their search, do you have a place that you would suggest for them to go if they’re looking for a photographer? Like where do they search? Like there are so options it seems, and do you have something there?

Aron Goss: There is a ton of options. Referrals are huge. I would definitely speak to your friends, speak to your family, find out who worked for them. It’s definitely a great place to start.

If you don’t want to be so pigeonholed with regards to wedding vendors your friends and family might have contact with, then definitely the next best spot would probably be a wedding planner. Wedding planners know how to match a client’s budget to the talent level that’s available.

So if they’re feeling like they’re not finding the quality of photography that they’re looking for with a simple, basic Google search, then definitely I would consider bringing in a planner.

Justin Jacques: Yeah.

Aron Goss: Talking to a planner. Let the planner know what your vision is, what your budget is, and that’s the planner’s job to match those and make sure that you don’t just get lucky finding a photographer that ranked very high on Google, but you actually find the right photographer that will work best for your personality, for your vision, and for your budget.

Justin Jacques: Cool, yeah. So I think planners are awesome, and I think they have a huge amount of knowledge around vendors especially, and just to navigate that, it doesn’t seem like it would be overwhelming, I’m thinking, so people get out a little bit into it, but then…

Aron Goss: It’s completely overwhelming.

Justin Jacques: Yeah.

Aron Goss: It’s completely overwhelming, and I’m going to say, hopefully, but its everyone is going through this for the first time.

Justin Jacques: Yeah.

Aron Goss: So there are so many questions that come up that I find most of my clients don’t have an answer, and when I got married, I didn’t have any answer to those questions either. People would ask me, “What’s your budget?” You don’t even know where to start sometimes. You don’t even know how you can interact with vendors. What vendors are you able to haggle on price perhaps? How many hours are really required for photography coverage? What’s a good price to be spending for specific vendors? So weddings are worth their weight in gold, both for coordination on the day of, but especially for planning.

Justin Jacques: Yeah, for sure.

Aron Goss: Yeah.

Justin Jacques: So you had mentioned that, just before we started the interview, you started now shooting both film and some digital?

Aron Goss: [Agrees]

Justin Jacques: Like what difference does that bring to images? And like also can you kind of describe like your style and what are some options if people are looking at a different wedding photogra