Although for a lot of my articles this month I am calling on my friends in the industry to help me out with tips and advice to give to you guys, obviously with photography, I can answer most of your questions myself about how to get the amazing wedding photos you deserve.
Believe it or not, improving the quality of your wedding photo’s starts right back at the initial meeting with your photographer and has absolutely nothing to do with their skills with a camera. The relationship that you build with your photographer is the most important aspect of getting amazing wedding pictures! The photographer can have all the equipment in the world and the most beautiful couple you can imagine, but if there is no friendship/relationship between the client and photographer, then it will be much harder on the wedding day to make you look relaxed on camera. When you have formed a friendship along the way through; meetings, the engagement shoot and the viewing session then you will trust your photographer on the wedding day to do their job and you will automatically look more relaxed in your pictures as you trust that they will make you look fantastic!
Out of all of your wedding suppliers, your photographer will be the person you spend the most time with on your wedding day. Choosing someone that you can spend an entire day with is very important.
When interviewing and meeting with photographers that you are considering booking for your wedding, it is important that you select a few different photographers whose style you like and then reach out to them to get some more information. It is not uncommon in the wedding industry that you will not be able to find price lists on suppliers websites and at best you can find a starting from price to at least see if they are around where you were thinking your budget may be. (Word of warning here, as with everything in life, weddings are way more expensive than you think due to the many hours of work that suppliers put in behind the scenes to ensure your day goes smoothly, add at least 30% to what you think something might cost and you might be about there) As a rule, in order to get the best photography you can, you should be aiming to spend about 10-15% of your entire wedding budget on a photographer with good photographers starting at around £1500 for coverage of a smaller event.
Get The Amazing Wedding Photos You Deserve by Having an Engagement Shoot.
Most photographers these days offer something that is called an engagement shoot. Some charge extra and some include it as part of your wedding package, some offer it as a try before you buy kind of deal before booking the photographer to cover your wedding. However it is offered, I really believe that you should have an engagement session with the photographer you choose to cover your wedding.
When you have an engagement session with the photographer who will cover your wedding, not only will it allow you to have some professional images to display as artwork in your home for the period leading up to your wedding, it will give you the chance to get to know what it feels like working with the photographer and it will give them a chance to learn all about you and how to make you look your best on camera without all the added pressure of the wedding day.
Is Photography an Important Aspect of Your Wedding Day?
When you are looking for a photographer and trying to decide who you will choose to make sure you get the amazing wedding photos you deserve, you really need to ask yourself how important these images are to you…
If photography is not important to you, then you will probably be happy to spend a little less on this aspect of your day, but if you want to get outstanding images, a beautiful album and modern artwork for your home, then you may well find yourself spending in the 15%+ of your total budget range to get a photographer who will be able to meet the aesthetic needs you have for your wedding images.
Communication
In order to get exactly what you want from your wedding photography, you need to communicate exactly what you want to your photographer. All photographers are skilled in capturing a wedding and have captured countless weddings over their years in business and will work tirelessly throughout the day to capture every little detail of the day. But if you tell them what the most important aspects of the day are and more importantly, the areas that have less importance to you, the photographer knows the areas where he can spend less time, in order to be able to focus more attention on the areas of the day that he knows you value more. This is great when it comes time to design the album as all the details that are important to you will have been captured in a such a way that designing your album with just the images that you love will be a doddle.
Wedding Albums and Artwork.
When you book a professional photographer to capture your day, what are you looking to do with the images that they create? Do you just want the digital files to upload to Facebook or keep on a USB drive in a drawer somewhere or do you want a beautifully designed and printed album that you can keep safe and look back on as time goes by? A wedding album really is the 1st piece in the story of you and your own family and will be handed down to your children and grandchildren as time goes by.
If creating this first family heirloom is important to you, then choose a photographer that offers albums as part of their service. I have heard so many horror stories about couples who just got digital files on a USB drive or CD (showing my age here! haha) with the intention to get around to creating their own album, but by the time they got around to it, they either didn’t have a device that could read the disk any more, or the type of ports on their laptops did not support the USB drive any longer. Professional photographers have access to some of the best printers in the world who specialise in creating these amazing heirloom quality albums that will last a lifetime. Sure, snappy snaps are cheaper, but this is for sure not an item that you want to risk the poor quality results you will get from a high street printer.
So to summerise, the following list is my top things that will help you get the amazing wedding photos you deserve.
- Relationship/Friendship with your photographer.
- A style of photography that you love.
- Have an engagement shoot so you get comfortable working with your photographer
- Communication and feedback. Tell your photographer what you like/dislike about the images you create at your engagement session to allow the photographer to adjust on your wedding day.
- Choose a photographer who offers quality products. These images are important to your family legacy and should be kept safe in an album that will last for a lifetime.
If you would like to follow along with this series of blog posts about wedding planning, we have the topics below.
