Deciding which wedding photographer to use is one of the most difficult and important decisions you have to make about your wedding day.
Deciding which wedding photographer to use is one of the most difficult and important decisions you have to make about your wedding day.
Important, because when the day you have been planning for years is over, the photographs that your photographer takes will be all that you have left to remember that day for many years to come. Difficult, because with most wedding photographers being small businesses, there are huge variations in quality, dependability, products, services, and demeanor depending on who you choose. When I was making this difficult decision myself, 12 years ago, being a professional photographer helped me out quite a bit. Hopefully the tips I have listed below will help you.
Don’t Put Much Trust In Huge Wedding Professional Listing Sites
When you do a Google search for “Maryland Wedding Photographer” or “Wedding Photographer in Philadelphia” …etc, some of the first results that show up will undoubtedly be wedding sites that contain lists of hundreds of wedding photographers. Don’t put much stock in the order they list wedding professionals in. Most of the sites offer tiers to wedding professionals, and their listing shows up higher the more they pay the listing service (not the better quality or more experienced they are). In some cases, the photographers listed near the top of the listing sites are simply new to wedding photography, do not have the network of referrals needed to keep a wedding business going, and testing a site out to see its cost vs. return on investment; and often decide, as I did, that all that money would be better invested in other areas. The bottom line is, most of the big name wedding listing services cost the photographer between $100 and $500 a month to list their business, and there is no qualification to be listed other than that you are willing to continually pay the money.
Quality, Quality, Quality
As a photographer, the quality of the work that the photographer you hire consistently produces is the single most important factor to consider in choosing your wedding photographer. Your photographer should:
-Be very technically knowledgeable, and know how to use their equipment and backup equipment
-Be able to adapt to any scenario, and lighting situation
-Know what difficult lighting scenarios arise when shooting a wedding (years of experience)
-Have a strong background in art and how it applies to photography (tilting the camera to the side in every shot doesn’t count :) )
Personality, Temperament, and Demeanor is important too
Being able to handle the stresses of the day, and do so without reacting badly (snapping at someone, storming off, giving up), is also an important skill your wedding photographer needs to posess. It is a tricky one to evaluate, as wedding photography is not something that everyone has the temperament for (including some working professionals I have met). Here I would suggest meeting with your photographer before/when you book them. Trust your gut feeling on what kind of person they are.
Work Ethic
Does the photographer try to go beyond what they promised you? Will they still be working their butt off at 11pm, near the end of the wedding reception? Or will they be sitting down and getting a few shots here and there? One of the best ways to tell this, is to look at some entire weddings that they have photographed. That selection of 15 or 20 images that they post on their blog or web site is not enough to evaluate what an entire wedding they photograph looks like. Look at several of their full recent weddings to get a better idea of what you will be getting, from beginning to end.
Technical Stuff
Your photographer should be:
-Shooting Raw Files-
Raw photography is really the only way to achieve consistent high quality professional images. To not do so would probably mean that the photographer is going to do very little editing. The resulting images would be inconsistent and not as high quality.
-Editing Your Images Individually-
While overall adjustments to large batches of images can be quicker (with something like Adobe Lightroom), there is no substitute for going in after those adjustments and making individual adjustments to each image like adjustments to cropping, contrast, brightness, exposure, sharpness, and most importantly color balance.
Do you get to keep your full resolution files?
This one was a big one for me, and I think should be for you too. The full resolution files (previously the negatives for anyone pre-2005) are your backup to everything that went on at your wedding. You are paying good money to have your wedding photographed (for a quality photographer), and you deserve to have your files so you can back them up, keep them safe, and use them in any way you see fit in the future (prints, albums, facebook, pinterest, holographic projections of yourself…etc). If they are not already included in your photographer’s package, get the price with them included, and consider that the base price. Back when I was looking for a wedding photographer, this was pretty hard to come by. I hope that now, with brides demanding them, photographers are more willing to include them.
How Intrusive Are They?
This is also a tough one, and the best way to tell is to meet the photographer and ask them. Some photographers think that they can get better shots if they are full throttle in your face the entire day. Some lighting setups that photographers bring can be pretty intense, and create somewhat of a spectacle. Some brides and grooms would be fine with that. Others, like myself, would like the photographer to remember that the day is about the bride, groom, and their family, not the photographer. I personally prefer the photographer to be much more low key, and intrude as little as possible on the wedding day (as the word photojournalism suggests).