Specialty Art & Frame Web Log

I don’t do weddings. I don’t care for the high levels of hormones or the stress that goes along with that one very important day. However, having just recently married off both my son and my daughter, I thought I would relay some of the things we found about wedding photos.

Check your references! When my son got married, he found a local photographer on the internet. Based on the photographers web site this guy was a genius with a camera. The photos on his web site looked great but when we got the photos back from my son’s wedding the results were poor at best. First there were only about 40 photos compared to 400 for my daughter’s wedding. Several of them were out of focus and a number were underexposed. Even photoshop couldn’t straighten these out. So lesson here is, check the references carefully.

Have two photographers. Don’t hire two different photography studios to shoot the same photos but make sure the photographer has a female assistant. If the main photographer is female, pay the price for her to bring an assistant along. A female photographer can go into the bride’s dressing room a lot easier then can a male. When shooting the formal portraits after the ceremony, it helps to have a second set of eyes looking for out of place ribbons or taking candids of the guests. We paid the extra cost and it was well worth it.

Know what photos you want. You’ll find a file in tyhe download section of this site called Wedding. This file lists 175 different poses or photos that are normally taken at a wedding. I don’t know that they are all necessary but look over the list of photos before you talk with the photographer and have an idea of what photos you “must have” then let them add in those favorites that they like to take.

Get it in writing. I don’t care if it is uncle charlie or Ansel Adams know what it will cost before the big day and have a writen contract. After the photos are taken is the wrong time to find out that you have to pay an extra $900 in order to get what you thought you wanted.

Tags: ansel adams, candids, different photography, dressing room, female photographer, formal portraits, genius, hormones, photographers, photography studios, stress, uncle charlie, wedding photos, weddings, wrong time

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.