Here are a few important characteristics to look for when interviewing your wedding photographer.
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Finally, don’t forget that your photographer is there to observe, not to organize (there are excellent wedding planners for that) and to catch you looking as beautiful as you have ever looked in your entire life. Invest in those pictures, as they will never be repeated and your great- great- grandchildren will thank you a thousand times for preserving those memories for generations to come.
Andrew Clark, President and Founder,The American Professional Wedding Photographers Association
It is very important that your photographer is quick, creative, competent and experienced under pressure. There is nothing worse than the interminable waiting for an inexperienced photographer to finish the family portraits after the ceremony when your guests are already at the cocktail party and you are missing out. Always ask for an assistant to accompany the photographer to speed this process up and have all your family members ready to be photographed right after the ceremony (or, preferably, during the rehearsal dinner the day before).
First, make sure he is a professional wedding photographer. Photographing weddings is more than a full time profession, but you will find many photographers who somehow "do it on the side". You wouldn’t go to a dentist or mechanic who "does it on the side" so why would you trust the most important memories of your life to a part-timer or a photographer who doesn’t specialize in weddings (or worst of all, a family friend)? I made that mistake myself, and believe me, I kick myself every anniversary for being so shortsighted and cheap!Make sure your photographer is able to "talk tech". He should be capturing digital image files in RAW mode on his cameras. A little tech if you please….these massive, uncompressed digital files capture of millions of colors, whereas the JPEG photographer is limiting your pictures to much smaller, compressed files and only 256 colors. Good photographers will want their incredible prints and albums to be their biggest promotional tools - and they rely on getting many referrals from people seeing their work on coffee tables and in frames at former clients’ homes. Because of this, they typically won’t give up the negatives for free.When you meet your photographer, review his work from a complete wedding, review his work from a variety of locations and lighting conditions and examine his references very closely. See if you like his personality; great chemistry with your photographer will produce great pictures, and a polite and confident photographer will never offend your guests or make anyone feel uncomfortable in front of his lens.
With the advent of digital capture, everybody is suddenly a photographer! Obviously, this is both the good news and the bad news. Your friends and family will bring compact, high-resolution digital cameras to your wedding and flood you with disks of cool images within 24 hours of your last dance. Bless them, because this will free up your professional photographer’s time to be creative and artistic, which, after all, is what you are paying him to be.
Capturing those images that speak volumes about the emotion and detail of a beautiful wedding day requires the keen eye of a well-trained photographer. This article is designed to help you weed out the good from the bad (and the downright ugly)!