Montreal's married couple nuptial photographers are an international success

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Davina Palik and Daniel Kudish (right) run their wedding photography business out of their condo in the Imperial Lofts building, pictured in Montreal on Tuesday May 29, 2012.

Photograph by: Allen McInnis , THE GAZETTE

MONTREAL - Three years ago, Daniel Kudish and Davina Palik, then boyfriend and girlfriend, ran At First Sight, a successful local wedding photography studio. They and a team of photographers shot as many as 83 weddings a year, a schedule that could mean attending up to five nuptials in a single weekend, often separately.

After about two years in business, they had become highly sought after, in large part because of their candid style and competitive prices. But the workload weighed heavily on both of them. “I wasn’t enjoying it anymore because it was just insane,” Palik says.

They also realized that working together, as a two-person team, yielded their strongest results. So at the end of 2009, they changed their course, abandoning their studio, taking fewer contracts and rebranding themselves davina + daniel.

Now husband and wife, Kudish and Palik, both in their 20s, are internationally recognized wedding photographers who spend much of the year documenting ceremonies and engagements in far-flung locales – in recent months, they’ve travelled to Turkey and Guatemala – in a distinctive, organic esthetic.

Their work, which borrows from art photography and photojournalism, has earned them accolades and won them followers from around the world. And their home base remains their St. Henri loft.

Palik, however, did not aspire to a career in photography. A graduate of Concordia’s journalism program, she met Kudish in 2007, while interning at an interior décor magazine for which he, a Dawson-trained commercial photographer, was shooting.

Kudish had not planned on working in weddings, either. After assisting a wedding photographer a couple of years earlier, though, his opinion of the genre changed. Before, he explains, “I just didn’t know anything else, besides the traditional stuff, like very posed and contrived – nothing that said this is creative photography.”

Now, though, each job – last year, he and Palik chronicled 26 weddings – brings with it a new set of challenges.

“Our goal is just always to be doing something different,” Palik says. “It’s to do something that, hopefully, the average photographer would never see and would never think to do.”

That objective informs their approach and their division of labour. At a wedding, Kudish says, while one shoots conservatively, taking photos that are all but guaranteed to turn out, “the other person will go around and have fun and try to come up with something more creative. It’s a risk, so if it doesn’t work out, at least we have the other (photos).”

In spite of their ages, few of the couples who hire them try to impose their own vision on their work. “The higher we’ve gone up on our price point,” Kudish says, “the more people respect us and listen to us, because they’re investing more.”

That investment is a significant one. Their starting rate is now $5,500, in addition to travel costs. But there is no shortage of couples willing to pay that price, they say. And few of them are hosting $100,000 weddings.

“Most of them are more normal budgets. They just value photography a lot, so they’re making us a priority,” Palik says. Still, the two market their service carefully, entering their work in contests and taking out listings on popular wedding blogs such as Style Me Pretty and Junebug. And Palik’s blogging on davina + daniel’s own site has been a boon for business, too. “I would have never thought, but brides tell me all the time that reading the blog gave them a sense that we really care about our clients,” she says.

It also has helped garner a following significant enough to offer workshops throughout North America and online. “We started first doing them just privately for people who were asking,” Kudish says, “and then there was more and more demand, so we started putting on group ones.”

And though destination weddings fill much of their calendar, they last year launched a separate studio, Grey Sparrow, with the local market in mind.

“We were still getting a lot of demand in Montreal, so we realized we were kind of sending all this business to our competition or to other people” through referrals, Kudish says.

In introducing the new service, they hired four more photographers, one of whom doubles as the studio’s manager. Kudish and Palik have removed themselves from Grey Sparrow’s daily operations, but they continue to host clinics to ensure that its approach mirrors their own.

“Whenever we come up with business ideas, we realize the best business to be in is the one you know most about,” Kudish says, “and wedding photography is what we know the most of.”