In Age of Digital, Port Jeff Photographer Reinvents Himself

Like many established wedding photography shops in the region, in Port Jefferson once had a bustling business but competition from an influx of cheap digital photographers has owner Mark Kauffman on the ropes.

He's is fighting back by using his years of experience and his unique style to launch a new online business assembling custom photo albums from other photographers’ work.

Kauffman, who says in his deadpan style that he is 59 years old “for the moment” has lived and worked as a professional photographer in Port Jefferson since 1985.

He started working with his father who had a wedding photography business in Queens during the Sixties. Like many children, Kaufman first rejected the idea of following in the family business but he started shooting weddings for extra money with his father, eventually taking over the business.

He opened his own wedding photography studio in 1989 out of his house in Port Jefferson. A few years later he rented space on Wynn Lane. After a quick stop over on East Main Street around 2002, Kaufman ended up in his current location at 713 Main Street in 2004.

A little over ten years ago, Kauffman was booked solid with weddings, frequently traveling into Manhattan to meet with clients seeking his spontaneous style of shooting. Freelance photographers would call him for work and he had enough extra to farm out.

“Photographers had always come to me looking for work,” he said. “I had an apprenticeship program.”

A budding photographer might come looking for work. Kauffman would send out the novice as an unpaid third photographer on a wedding shoot. He’d critique the work and eventually the apprentice would be promoted to a paying spot.

“Back then I’d do 175 weddings a year without a hitch,” he said.

A year or two later that number was “significantly lower” according to Kauffman. It started after 9/11 with the downturn in the economy then continued going down because of the low cost and rising popularity of digital photography.

That combination was like a one-two punch to his business.

“At first I thought it was the economy and the economy will turn around,” he said. “Then I thought that it’s more than just that. In my small corner of the universe, my lab and the album company, they were going through the same things.”

Digital Competition

“It seems that people don’t care as much anymore and because of the economy it’s become worse,” said Kauffman. “There’s been a paradigm shift in photography.”

Most photographers in the area used to be in the same price range. Couples would chose from a slate of photographers who they liked based on style and personality.

“Now it’s not as important,” he said. “Part timers are meeting couples at Starbucks, going out for $300 a day.”

Lana Rowe, a wedding photographer based in Smithtown has had a very similar experience. She’s been in the business for over 15 years. She started her career shooting with film, eventually trading for digital.

“We used to shoot 400 pictures,” she said. “You had to be careful. Now people are snapping away like crazy taking a lot more pictures. There’s less finesse.”

It may be a chicken or the egg kind of situation but nowadays not only are digital photographers able to take more pictures but clients are also asking for more photos too.

“People are looking for quantity not quality,” she said.

Those “part-timers” as Kauffman calls them will hand over a CD of thousands of photos at the end of an occasion and that’s the extent of the relationship.

“That’s the easiest thing in the world,” Kaufman said. “The idea is to get something of value in addition and that’s being missed now.”

Kauffman laments the fact that taking a professional photograph was once considered a valuable commodity; now it’s become nearly worthless.

“The idea of copyright for a professional photographer has always been important,” he said. “Now people think that the photographer should hand over to them a CD of high resolution photos.”

Essentially, Kauffman thinks photographers of the stripe found on Craigslist on the cheap have driven down prices so far that a professional can’t make a living selling a photograph.

“They’re not doing that little extra of looking at the camera,” he said. “We have equipment and back up equipment for all our equipment. Lenses all over the place, cords, back up cords, bodies and more bodies.”

Rowe says that because of digital equipment, the barrier to entry has been dramatically lowered.

“When we used to shoot film you had to know what you were doing,” she said. “You had to know how to handle equipment, know how it worked and you had to invest $4000 to $5000 to get started.”

Another downside according to Kauffman is that most of the low cost photographers don’t know what to expect from different types of weddings.

“Jewish, Episcopal, Greek, inside, outside or whatever,” he said. “For example in a Greek Wedding they circle around five times, which is different from a Jewish wedding, which is different from a Catholic wedding. It’s good to know what’s happening at every ceremony.”

A search in the Long Island region on Craigslist for “Wedding Photographers” yields more than a hundred results, though some are duplicates of the same ad.

One listing advertises a wedding photography firm consisting of professional photographers. In all caps the ad says that the photographers have inexpensive rates because they “have full time jobs and do this for fun.” It clearly states that they do not rely on wedding photography for income.

Another Craigslist ad says that the “wedding photographer will cover your event from start to finish and deliver all high res images on a disc same night and you can do anything you want with them all, mention this ad and get a free online gallery.”

In the heading of another listing the photographer advertises $350 for a four-hour session. For the price they promise an online gallery with print ordering, a full resolution DVD and that “all photos edited to enhance the colors and ready to print.”

The ad asks the obvious question: Why such a low price? The answer given is that they are trying to establish new clientele.

Bucking that trend somewhat is an ad for BACD Photography. The listing is for a husband and wife team of photographers who promise that they “like natural light, true people, true reaction and not too many posed pictures.” They advertise that their prices start at $1900 for a local wedding.

Kauffman still photographs weddings out of his studio but the photographers that he used to mentor as unpaid third-photographer apprentices–the ones he says in the past he’d never even send out for an hour wedding at Village Hall on their own–are now his competition.

“When I used to ask people before what other photographers they had seen, I used to know all of them,” he said. “Now I don’t know anyone’s names.”

Rowe said she finds a similar situation in the marketplace.

“I used to have three competitors,” she said. “Now I have four hundred.”

Creating Value

“I think good photography is still worth while,” Kauffman said. “A good album is still valuable twenty years later.”

Angela Tringone used Kauffman’s Angelica Studios back in 2004 for her wedding and she agrees. The couple sat with a bunch of other photographers on Long Island and they found his spontaneous style to be the best.

“At the time it was unique,” she said. “A lot of people try to copy that now.”

She felt that other photographers were not as willing to work with her designing her album when others were very “cut and dry with only one thing to offer.”

“My wedding album is a family heirloom,” she said. “I’m not exaggerating.”

Rowe agrees that the wedding album is a tradition to be treasured saying, “When they get those pictures on a disk what happens when you have your grandchild on your lap and all you have are a bunch of disks to show?”

Kauffman is putting stock into a new online business called Artistic Albums and he thinks he’s found a niche. It even relies on one of the biggest faults of the part-timers who shoot a wedding and then just hand over high-resolution CDs.

“They don’t want to bother with the trouble of designing an album,” Kauffman said.

His new business is an online service where he will design wedding albums for people who have high-resolution images from other photographers but no album to show for it.

Kauffman searched for the best albums he could find online. What he found he calls “cheapo.”

“All people have available to them online is cheap junk as far as quality of the physical album,” he said.

He means to change that by taking his decades of experience assembling quality albums for his clients and applying it to a new business.

“There’s no design,” Kauffman said as he showed off an example of a typical online album. “This picture has no relevance. It’s a busy mess.”

As Kauffman showed off an album that he designed, he points out the differences between an album made by a customer and an album he did from someone’s online pictures shot by another photographer.

“It has integrity. It tells a story,” he said. “You can see the pictures and they relate to each other.”

Seeing that need for an album to tell a story no matter who took the pictures is what motivates him now. Perhaps it goes against his better judgment but even though he didn’t take the pictures, Kauffman will help design an album that he hopes will be the kind that will last.

“Nineteen out of 20 customers who come in prefer the albums that I prefer,” he said. “There is a market out there for quality albums.”

As for price point he says in his online business he will charge half of what he does for his own photography customers because he’s not selling his own pictures, just albums of someone else’s work.

In his new business he’s taken to advertising on Facebook and embracing Search Engine Optimization techniques to be found online.

“I’m trying everything I can,” he said. “It used to be very easy to take out ads. Now we have to be in the top half page of a Google search.”

Kauffman says that first and foremost he is still a professional artist, which is why he still shoots weddings.

“I love my work,” said Kauffman. “I love every aspect of it. I’d love for it to be valued again.”