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Choosing a Wedding Photographer
One of the hardest and most crucial decisions any couple make when planning their wedding is when they come to choosing a photographer. Competition in this field is extremely fierce, as anyone that Google's 'Wedding Photographer' will have found. However, standards and price vary, and they rarely go hand-in-hand. To help you, here's a step-by-step method of finding the right photographer.
1. How much coverage do you want?
This may surprise people, but how many hours you employ a photographer for on the day for not only dictates the amount of time they're being used, but how many photographs they take and therefore how long they have to spend on their computer processing them. You can carve up a wedding day in to three parts - the preparations, the main ceremony and the breakfast / dance.
It's a given that you'll want the main ceremony covered, so deciding on whether you'd like the other two portions photographed will have a large bearing on how much your quotes come out at. It will also indicate the flexibility (or otherwise) of your photographer. Some will be happy to just cover the ceremony for instance, whereas others will insist that you employ them for the day for a flat rate.
Many clients of mine start by assuming that they won't need the preparations covered, but actually these can be some of the best photographs of the whole day. They are certainly better than photographs of the speech of the cake-cutting for instance, as they lend more latitude to the photographers flair and creativity. There's only so many ways you can photograph a couple cutting a cake!
Once you've decided on coverage, move on to...
2. Budget
Like everything you add to your wedding package, how much you can afford to spend will narrow down the field. By now you've decided how much coverage you'd like, so what your budget will stretch to will now decide which photographers you can use.
Prices vary wildly, and are no indication of quality. As a rough guide, for coverage of just the service you can expect to pay anything from £400 to £1k, with the other two portions a percentage of that (about half). So for a full day's photography you can expect to spend between a thousand pounds and £2,500, depending on the photographer. As I've already said though, this is not an indication of quality, so budget for what you can afford and stick to it!
3. Portfolio
Once you know how much coverage you'd like and how much you want to spend, you need to start looking at photographers work to see what you like, and usually this involves looking through website portfolios of work. Be very careful here - some photographers only have their 'greatest hits' on their websites. Try to find a photographer that has full examples of several weddings on his or her site.
The second thing to beware of is quite shocking - theft of other people's photographs. Some unscrupulous photographers will download competitors pictures and claim them as their own. Again, if a website only has a 'greatest hits' montage for you to look through, this can be very hard to detect. However, if there are full portfolios with a client's name attached, it is far more likely the photographer in question actually took the photographs in the first place.
4. Get 5 Quotes
Now send out a short email to your top five photographers. They should be relatively local to you, and if they indicate their prices on their website they should be within your budget. In your email, say how much you want to spend, how much coverage you want and ask if they are available on your date. If they are, say you'd like a no-obligation consultation at your home. Unless the photographer can accommodate all of the above, walk away and find another - as I've said, there's plenty of competition - until you've narrowed down 5 photographers that are available on your date and are within your budget. If 5 is too many due to time constraints, then 3 is a minimum. The more you can look at, the better value for money you'll end up with.
5. Set Up a Consultation
The last thing to do is to have the photographers bring their portfolio's around to your home and meet with you. Don't arrange times so that they can bump in to each other, this can be awkward and is considered rude. You want your favourite photographer to agree to cover your wedding, not suddenly become booked because of a bad experience at your first meeting. Allow an hour for the consultation, offer them plenty of soft drinks (there's a lot of talking involved!) and have a good look at their work. This is where you find out the most important thing - how do you get on with them.
Your wedding photographer will be following you around all day, and by the end no matter how much you like them, you'll be glad to see the back of them! So finding one that you can relate to and you're comfortable with is extremely important. Combine this with budget, coverage and a portfolio of work that fits your taste, and you can't go far wrong.
With Many Thanks To Turner Photographic for the above article.
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