Marin is a documentary-style wedding photographer with a beautiful portfolio and prices that scared no one. Her site looked like a hobby. We rebuilt it as an editorial brand and the perceived value finally caught up to her actual work.
Marin Ashby is a documentary-style wedding photographer in Austin. Her work is genuinely beautiful — moody, quiet, emotionally honest. She charges $6,500 minimum for a wedding, which is fair-to-low for her quality in the Austin market.
Her old website was a generic Squarespace template. Pink-ish. Cursive font in the header. A grid of 60 photos on the homepage with no curation. Pricing buried on a "Pricing & Info" tab. The vibe was "fun friendly photographer," not "discerning $7K artist."
Result: she was getting plenty of inquiries from couples with $2,500 budgets and almost none from her actual target — couples investing $8K-$15K total on photography.
Photography websites have a unique problem: the work IS the product, and most photographers think showing more of it = better. Wrong. Showing less, curated harder, with editorial structure around it, raises perceived value dramatically.
Stop being "an Austin wedding photographer." Become "the photographer for couples who'd rather have 30 great photos than 600 average ones."
Repositioning a photographer is mostly a curation and copy problem, not a design problem. We needed her site to feel like a magazine — quiet, edited, confident — instead of a portfolio dump.
New homepage shows exactly 4 hero images, rotating in a slow fade. Below: a single bold statement of position. Below that: 3 carefully chosen story-pairs (two photos each, with a one-sentence caption). Total images on the homepage: 10. Old version: 60.
Documentary wedding photography for couples who want to remember the day as it actually was — not how it would look on a Pinterest board.
The new About page is 800 words. It's structured as Marin's actual photography philosophy: why she shoots on film for portraits and digital for receptions, what she means by "documentary," what she won't do (formal posed family lineups beyond 15 minutes, "first look" reveals choreographed for the camera). The page is opinionated. Opinionated artists charge more.
We put the pricing on the homepage. Three tiers — $6,500, $9,500, $14,000 — each with a brief description. This sounds counterintuitive but it filters her inbox aggressively. Now every inquiry is already pre-qualified at the budget level, so Marin spends time on conversations that close instead of conversations that won't.
Most photography "experts" tell creatives to hide pricing. They're wrong for anyone above $5K. Hiding pricing only works for low-end services where the conversion happens through volume. At $6,500+, hiding pricing wastes the photographer's time and trains the wrong leads to inquire.
The site now has a "Journals" section: long-form recaps of full weddings, written in past tense, like a magazine feature. Each one targets local SEO keywords ("Hill Country wedding photographer," "Driskill Hotel wedding") while building the brand voice. Two journals per month, going forward.
Generic Squarespace template. 60 unfiltered images on homepage. No pricing visible. About page was 3 sentences. Inquiries averaged $2,800 budget.
Editorial-style Framer build. 10 curated images on homepage. Pricing shown prominently. About page is an 800-word philosophy essay. Inquiries now pre-qualified at $6,500+ minimum.
Agency line items, roughly:
Our flat package: $1,500. (Logo design and the seed journal entries would be a small add-on.)
If your work is worth more than your site suggests, we'd love to talk. We do this kind of repositioning project for photographers, designers, interior architects, and other visual creatives.
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