Professional Photographers - Join Us!   Follow us on X

Rent the studio and our "Portrait Park" located directly behind the studio.  John will be your assistant.

Work under your own business license.  Carry your own liability insurance.  Seeking just 2 more photographers.

Be a 2nd shooter.  Be the first choice offered a wedding photography assignment when John is already booked.  Be John's backup photographer when an emergency takes place and John can't make it.  John can be your 2nd shooter.   Besides enjoying this needed professional business relationship with John for your mutual benefit, you also receive:

1. FREE Premium Listing on the Six Counties+ Business Directory of east Tennessee.

2. Your business cards, wedding album sample(s) and other promotional materials may be kept in the studio for meeting with prospective wedding photography clients.  Also makes great satellite office!

3. Your own Professional Photographer page right here on the Top Class Portraits website with links to your own website and more to effectively market your services.

4.  Help your business grow more cost-effectively!  There are reasons the most successful businesses have multiple employees, independent contractors and multiple photographers on the same shoot.  It's about providing the BEST SERVICES to our clients!

5. We create and host online Virtual Wedding Albums of YOUR work.  FREE.  Whether any of the other photographers in our Team shoot with you or not, a virtual wedding album and hosting for one year will be created for weddings you have shot.

Conflict of Interest?

Some photographers don't understand and even suspicious why I would be promoting their services as a photographer or videographer team member.  I've been in this industry longer than 22 years.  One of the things I learned a few decades ago is that there are plenty of weddings to go around.  

Are you and I actually competitors?  Do you really think out of over 50,000 weddings in east Tennessee every year that you will lose weddings to me?  Do I really think I will lose weddings to you?  As members of a wedding photography agency, we are not direct competitors but we are professionals who's services COMPLIMENT one another.  By working together as a team in this agency - we provide greater services to our clients.  We each bring different styles, personalities, pricing, policies and more which attract the Brides-to-be to the agency.  The needs of the Bride & Groom determine how involved each of us becomes with each couple.  But I can truly assure you.  Neither of us will put the other out of business with over 50,000 weddings a year in east Tennessee.

Brides are attracted to our agency because of the variety of talent she may consider at one location and a photographer who meets her budget.  One wedding photography consultation at our agency provides her many options.  So photographer members collectively as an agency help one another to acquire wedding photography assignments we probably wouldn't have acquired as a lone wolf.  Sometimes its smarter for a few wolves to travel in small packs. 🙂 - John Wilson

Photographer/Studio Owner John Wilson

I use to own and operate a custom black & white photo lab with a couple of other portrait studios I owned in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My photo lab was called Creative Darkrooms for the sake of anyone reading who might remember.  I prefer my digital photo lab now.

Serving professional photographers all over the United States. I'm a stickler about printing true black & white images. Back then in my film and chemical days, I was printing with Aristo cold light enlarger heads. The Aristo enlarger heads didn't put out heat which would often cause a film negative to buckle under traditional enlarger light causing focus issues on paper. Also the Aristo light minimized the appearance of dust specks on prints.

Printing color film on Kodak Panalure photo paper and on a variety of multi-contrast b&w papers from various manufacturers. Ansel Adams and the zone system were my heroes. Today, my goal is creating black & white photographic prints with all eleven zones between the whitest whites to the blackest of blacks truly represented where possible. Real B&W. I do NOT like so-called B&W photographs which are muddy zones of grey with no clean whites anywhere to be found.

Also still operating my photography business at the time as Wedding Photographics.  Shooting with two Pentax 645 medium format film cameras.  Must have shot well over 500 film weddings before moving to Chattanooga.

When I'm not in the studio or lab I'm the Multimedia Marketing Producer for WebSearch Matrix.  The Six Counties+ Business Directory of eastern Tennessee is an internet property of WebSearch Matrix. 

Creative Darkrooms I operated while also working as a wedding photographer.   I continued Creative Darkrooms while I was also employed by MasterPortrait Studios in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  I definitely prefer my digital photo lab I now operate.

No more storing gallons of distilled water to mix my liquid photo chemicals for processing films.  I preferred distilled water to protect the films from various impurities in tap water.  Especially any high iron content.  E6 for processing Ektachrome slide film.  C-41 for negative films.  Various powder and liquid B&W chemicals.  Testing various mixing ratios, processing temperatures and times with various films to get certain image characteristics.  Working with various brand multi-contrast black & white photo papers and working with various processing temperatures and processing times to achieve certain image results.  Those were the days.  Now, with digital, it's a lot less headaches and less time consuming, tedious and easier to get the image results I want.  The color enlarger and the tabletop print processor below were my main equipment.  I also home-built a vacuum easel mounted on wall for 20" x 24" printing.