If you’re somewhere in the 4 to 7K range, or even the 8 to 10K range, and you keep watching other photographers book double, triple, QUADRUPLE what you charge while your work looks just as good as theirs, this episode is going to shift something for you. My guest today is John Bunn – wedding photographer, filmmaker, and host of the Shifting Focus podcast – and he is 20 years into weddings, averaging 25K to 30K per wedding, with a 60K photo and video booking on his calendar for next year. But the numbers are not why I wanted him on the show for this Pricing Conversations series. I wanted him here because of how he got there, one step at a time, over two decades, without a single leap. We talk about what John calls the middle mindset, the three levers every photography business actually runs on, why raising your prices has almost nothing to do with your portfolio, and the full story behind that 60K booking – including the choice he made at a rehearsal dinner that had nothing to do with money. Listen to the episode below, or keep reading for a summary of what’s covered.
And for a new way to experience the podcast, watch it here on Youtube!
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Meet John Bunn: 20 Years of Weddings, Starting at $500 a Wedding
John stumbled into weddings in 2007, back when most of you were probably still in school. He started as a wedding filmmaker in an era when wedding filmmaking barely existed as a craft – he describes it as an older guy with a tripod on wheels squeaking into the middle of the dance floor with a bright light. He was in college for video, working on the media team at a church, and he looked at that and thought, I could do this so much better.
He was making around $500 a wedding at the beginning. No Instagram. No education industry. You marketed at a bridal show at the convention center downtown a couple of times a year, and Google Ads and Facebook were brand new. It was in-person, hand to hand, and it was rough going.
What John figured out over those early years is that he was good at selling and good at people – and that was enough to build a six-figure business before his work was anywhere near where it is now. By 2018, about ten years in, he was charging 5 to 8K for video and had gone full time. Photographers started asking him how, which turned into answering questions in Facebook groups, which turned into the How to Film Weddings podcast (over a million audio downloads), courses, and masterminds. He added photography three or four years back and pushed six figures in his first full year of photo in 2025. Today everything he teaches lives under his own brand, Shifting Focus.
What the “Middle Mindset” Actually Looks Like in a Photography Business
John says he’s almost stopped calling it the middle market, because it isn’t a dollar figure. It’s a mindset. It’s the photographer who got into weddings, found her groove, and says yes a lot – because she’s never gotten intentional or clear about who she wants to serve and why. Her calendar fills based on whatever comes in that year. She isn’t running her schedule, her schedule is running her.
She’s making good money because she’s shooting a lot. From the outside it looks great. On the inside, she’s quietly burning out.
And the reason it feels impossible to change is this: our industry books 12 to 18 months out. As John put it, it’s really hard to turn the Titanic. You can’t wake up one morning, decide you’ve changed, and have it show up on your calendar. That’s exactly why the work you do right now matters so much for the year after next.
The Three Levers: Your Work, Your Brand, and Your Network
This is the framework John is building out as the exposure triangle – because it works like a camera. You can technically expose an image by cranking your ISO alone, but something is going to feel off. The three settings are designed to work in tandem, and so is your business.
Your three levers are your work, your brand, and your network. Most photographers find the one lever they’re naturally good at and pull it forever. For a lot of us, that lever is our work – get better, get better, get better. And that works beautifully at the start. Between year one and year two, your work might improve 100 or 200%. But John is in his 20th year, and the difference between his 19th and 20th year is maybe 1%. He can keep pulling that lever as hard as he wants and it barely changes anything anymore.
Meanwhile the other two levers have been sitting untouched.
John defines brand as how people experience you – how your couples would describe you to someone else when you’re not in the room. At a wedding, you are your brand in real life: the way you dress, the way you carry yourself, the way you make people feel. And network is a big umbrella. It’s social media, ads, vendors, planners, previous couples, even the bridesmaids who now know you exist.
Here’s the part I want you to write down. John’s rough math: if your work is unicorn-level in one of the three, you can get into the high-end market. Be a unicorn in two, and you can get into luxury. To sit at the ultra tippy-top, you pretty much have to be a unicorn in all three. He walked through Jose Villa as the example – decades of honing the craft, a brand where people say he shot Justin Bieber’s wedding, he shot Paris Hilton’s wedding, and a network where he knows every high-end planner and has genuinely taken care of people for years. All three, stacked, over time.
Why Steps Beat Leaps When You’re Raising Your Prices
I asked John directly about something I’ve been teaching all through this Pricing Conversations series: that photographers try to push for luxury too fast, and that there’s a sweet spot around 4 to 7K worth mastering before you go chasing 10 and 15K. He agreed 100%. A lot of people want the microwave. He’s a slow cooker guy.
His ladder analogy is so good. Step onto the first rung and your perspective changes a little. Climb four or five rungs and it’s a completely different view – and you can stay there a while, get comfortable, and look back at how far you’ve come. The reason he doesn’t want anyone skipping rungs is simple: he doesn’t want you arriving at your destination missing a tool in your tool belt.
He photographed a wedding in the Bahamas this year for a billionaire family that he estimates spent $3 to $5 million on a full week of events – custom ice sculptures with each guest’s initial in front of their plate, custom stationery, the highest end of everything. And he said if he’d booked that wedding five years earlier, he would have gone and cried in a corner. Instead, he was never nervous once. He knew when to take control and when to pull back. He could tell when the family was stressed and exactly how to handle it. That came from roughly 100 heavily designed weddings before it, each one a rung.
His couples texted him afterward to tell him he was the best decision they made in their entire wedding. That’s what the rungs buy you.
The One Step to Take This Week: Get Clear on Your Dream and Nightmare Weddings
When I asked what one thing a photographer could do this week, John’s answer was clarity – and he had a specific exercise for it.
Take an hour. Think back through the last couple of years of weddings and write out, in high definition, every detail of the ones you hated. The parking was awful. The planner treated you a certain way. The groom was deadpan the entire day and only smiled when the camera came up. Get petty and specific. Then flip it and write out everything you loved. You can even hand that to AI and have it help you build the picture of your ideal wedding.
Because once you know what you actually want in front of your lens, you can reverse engineer it. As John said, if he knows he wants to shoot $30,000 weddings in Italy, now he knows what his network has to look like, what his website has to look like, and what the work itself has to be.
He shared a mastermind student in Florida charging 15K who couldn’t break into the 20K market. His work was beautiful. His brand was beautiful. So John asked him about his network – who do you know that’s booking $20,000 photographers, what rooms are you in? And the student said if he scored himself on the 20K-and-above network, he’d be a zero. He didn’t know anyone in it. That’s a fixable problem. But he never would have found it by getting better at his work.
The trap is climbing someone else’s ladder, getting to the top, and realizing it was leaned against the wrong wall. That’s why I will always tell you what I’ve learned and also tell you it doesn’t mean it’s what you should do. Neither of us teaches “do what I did.”
Abundance Over Lack: The Mindset Difference John Sees at the Top
After 400+ podcast episodes interviewing some of the best in the world, the biggest pattern John notices is abundance over lack. A lot of photographers treat money like a pizza – if she gets that booking, there’s less left for me. But money isn’t a finite pie. Every hour someone works, more value is created. John has never once looked at someone else’s booking and thought she took that from me. He also looked it up: there are over 10,000 weddings a year in the greater Tulsa area alone.
The other pattern? They’re action takers. It’s so much easier to steer a moving car than a parked car. They’re at the conferences, at the workshops, at the monthly networking events, in the DMs, getting better at their craft the whole time. And when a conference in Maui costs $10,000, that’s a leap, not a step. Your step might be ten minutes a day on Instagram commenting and messaging, or showing up to the local coffee meetup.
The Full Story Behind the $60K Booking
Here’s how the biggest booking of John’s career actually happened, and I promise it’s not what you think.
John is relentlessly consistent. Something in his Instagram stories every single day for two years straight. Around two posts a week. And he’s on episode 477 of his podcast without ever missing a Monday. A wedding planning company found him through that consistency and inquired earlier this year for a wedding in Texas at around 25K for video.
It’s rehearsal dinner night and the timeline is running an hour and a half behind. The photographer – a big name, great company – leaves after two hours because two hours is what they were contracted for, and misses the speeches. John stays four and a half hours. When the family offered to pay him extra for the overage, he told them 25K was plenty and he could squeak out another hour for them.
He filmed the speeches. They were beautiful, they wrecked him a little, and he ended up texting his wife that he loved her and wanted to be a better dad. Then he talked with the father of the bride afterward, and the mother came over and hugged him, and they talked about life and faith. He also made a point of learning the two planners’ names when nobody else could ever tell them apart, and grabbed extra footage of them working.
A week after delivery, the dad sent him an audio note saying he wasn’t supposed to say it yet, but John was booked for two more weddings – he has two other daughters. Then the second daughter’s fiancé called and flew him to Houston for the proposal. The family had loved the video and been underwhelmed by the photography, and they hadn’t even known John shot photo when they booked him. So they asked if he’d do both.
That’s the 60K booking – photo and video for next year at a chateau in Houston, with full creative freedom. Plus the proposal, plus engagements at the beach, plus a friend group of about 20 women who all care about their families, their faith, and their photos. He didn’t go to Engage in Maui to meet these people. He just took the steps, and as he says, every wedding is a new branch on your business.
The €2,000 Wedding in Italy That Turned Into $22,000
This is the other story I want you to sit with. Back in 2019, John knew he wanted high-end destination work, and he found out a previous bride’s sister was getting married in Italy. The couple was gorgeous, the wedding was going to be gorgeous, the family already loved him, and they were going to let him create whatever he wanted. Two of his three criteria were there – so he basically begged them to let him shoot it for €2,000 plus flights and hotel, about five grand total.
He overpacked wildly (he brought suitcases when he needed a backpack) and worked incredibly hard. And then he put the work out. Suddenly his brand said John goes to Italy to shoot weddings.
A couple in Charleston saw that wedding on YouTube and paid him $22,000 for their destination wedding. That one led to Cabo. Cabo led to the next one. The branch spread out, and it spread because he knew where he was aiming instead of letting the flow of the business take him wherever it went.
Booking a 60K Couple vs a 6K Couple: The Real Difference
John still takes a 5 or 6K booking on a slow weekend if he likes the couple and it meets two of his three criteria – often when a planner he admires brings him something beautiful. This year he has 12 weddings, which is enough for him not to need more, so he’s home. That’s the life-first piece I care so much about.
But here’s what surprised me: he says the middle is actually the hardest place to sell. Those couples see Pinterest and Instagram and The Knot telling them the average wedding costs $50,000, while showing images from million-dollar weddings. So they’re sitting there with $5,000 for photography and an expectation that it should look like a six-figure celebration, which turns into micromanaging every detail. It’s not about the money they have. It’s about the lack they’re operating from.
Higher-end couples make decisions differently. When the country club in the Bahamas said their insurance wouldn’t allow jet skis for the beach day, the mother of the bride made a call and had people bring jet skis over from another resort. When she wanted photos under a floral installation in the worst light of the day, the photographer hesitated and John said let’s go – the photos won’t be as good, but she’s happy, and that’s the job.
His point for the artists among us: there will always be room for you to create your art if you start with how you’re serving the people in front of you.
He also learns the language of luxury on purpose – staying in the resorts, sitting in the hotel lobbies, walking into the Louis Vuitton store in Vegas just to watch how they sell. And he told me flat out that he never books someone who found him today. In the middle market you can, because those couples are comparing numbers. Above it, they inquire already knowing who you are. It’s the Mercedes dealership: you walk in, it smells different, nobody’s salesy, and you don’t have to ask if it’s expensive.
John’s Two Triangles
Before we wrapped, I had John name both frameworks again, because they’re the whole episode in six words.
The exposure triangle – your work, your brand, and your network. That’s what gets you to the next tier.
The success triangle – work with couples you love, create work that speaks to your soul, and get paid really well to do it. John aims for all three every time. Sometimes he gets two. If it’s only one, he says no.
Key Takeaways from this Episode:
- The “middle” isn’t a price point, it’s a mindset – saying yes to everything because you’ve never gotten clear on who you want to serve
- Your business runs on three levers: your work, your brand, and your network, and most photographers only ever pull one
- After a certain point, getting better at your work barely changes your income – your brand and network are where the growth is hiding
- Steps, not leaps. You don’t want to arrive at a 60K wedding missing a tool you would have picked up on the rung below
- Spend an hour writing out your nightmare weddings and your favorite weddings in high definition – that clarity is what tells you which lever to pull
- Consistency compounds. Daily stories and a weekly podcast for years is what put John in front of the planner who brought him a 25K booking
- Abundance over lack changes what you do at the wedding, and what you do at the wedding is what books the next three
- Every wedding is a new branch on your business
What’s Covered in this Episode:
- John’s path from $500 wedding films in 2007 to averaging 25K to 30K per wedding
- What the middle mindset looks like on a calendar and why it’s so hard to change direction
- The exposure triangle: work, brand, and network, and how many you need to be a unicorn in for each market tier
- Why photographers push for luxury too fast, and what to master first
- The Bahamas wedding and why he wasn’t nervous once
- The exact clarity exercise to do this week
- The full story behind the 60K photo and video booking, start to finish
- The €2,000 Italy wedding that turned into a $22,000 destination booking
- Why the middle market is harder to sell than the luxury market
- Learning the language of luxury, and why he never books someone who found him today
Featured Offerings or Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Take the Booking Bottleneck Quiz – 12 questions, about three minutes, and it tells you which of the five foundations of your business is the bottleneck quietly costing you bookings right now, plus one action step to take this week
- Join the waitlist for Book It – the complete business foundation that takes wedding photographers from working hard and hoping the right clients find you → sought after, choosing their clients, charging what they actually want, and running a business that works harder than them. Consistent overflow instead of scarcity.
- Explore Scale It – for photographers ready to scale, reclaim their time, and build systems that hold without them
- John Bunn’s website and education – podcast, courses, masterminds, and in-person events
- The Shifting Focus podcast – John’s show, 477 episodes deep and never a missed Monday
- John’s Exposure Triangle Quiz – scores you from 0 to 100 on your work, your brand, and your network. He normally only shares this with his mastermind students
- The Shifting Focus Experience – October 27th and 28th in Tulsa, keynotes, guest speakers, and a full styled shoot designed by one of John’s luxury planner friends. Tickets are $2,000 and there were only five or six left when we recorded
- Claire’s Instagram: @itsclairehunt
- John’s Instagram
- For a new way to experience the podcast, watch it here on Youtube!
Thank you so much for hanging out with me and John today – this one really stretched me, and I hope it stretched what you believe is available to you too. If you loved it, would you leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify so this episode can reach more photographers who need it? And screenshot this one, share it on Instagram, and tag me @itsclairehunt. I would love to know which of the three levers you’ve been ignoring. Until next time, my friend!
