Tips on hiring a wedding photographer

As you begin your search for a wedding photographer you will probably have heard that you should be careful who you choose.  You have probably read online a few questions to ask potential photographers to make sure they are professionals and will be good for your wedding.

*Just for your information, all of the images in these articles are my images.  I would never openly criticize anyone else’s work and therefore I’ve manipulated my images to get a look that I have seen when looking at other people’s wedding pictures.

I would like to share with you a few things that can go wrong with the pictures of a wedding so you can learn to spot for yourself what would be a good picture and what would be a bad picture.

One of the best things about a wedding is that it is a one time event.  For the photographer however this makes each wedding a pressure filled situation.  The photographer only has one chance to get the pictures right and he has many opportunities to mess them up.  Here are a few examples.

This is the example I see most often When looking at this photo at first it doesn’t look too bad.  There are natural emotions on the couple’s face, they are in a pretty location, which could lead to a nice photo.  The problem is that her dress is blue!  I don’t really notice this right away because my brain says the dress is white and it compensates to think that it is, but when we look closely all the shadowing is blue and some of the dress is too.

What happens to create this photo is when the camera setting called (white balance – what the camera thinks is white) is wrong and it gives a blue, or orange tinge to the photo which discolors the dress.  I have a close friend who when I talk about wedding photos gets frustrated because she says “I didn’t wear a blue dress on my wedding day!”

Example number 2

This same photograph, thankfully isn’t blue, this image would have been taken with the proper white balance but instead of messing up the color the dress is what is called “blown out”.  This is when the picture is too bright for the camera to capture the detail of the brightest item in the picture.  In this case that item is the dress.  In really bad situations the photos can look like thisOne might say, “how can this happen?” Unfortunately I have seen people’s wedding photos look like this because there are so many things going on during the photos that with inexperience this can be missed on the 2.5 inch screen on a sunny day.  A photographer quickly glances at the screen and says to him/herself, “yup, I’ve got it” and off they go to another spot.  Maybe the photographer got some advice to shoot in a different camera mode than he/she was used to and forgot to change the settings when the lighting conditions changed.  In a decent scenario maybe only one location was messed up because you had been shooting in the shade all day and went to one sunny spot (let’s hope that spot isn’t your ceremony), in a bad scenario most of them may be messed up (and once you loose detail in a photo you can’t get it back), and in a good scenario this doesn’t happen at all.

Here is this same photo with proper exposure and colorNotice the white dress, and how there is still detail in the brightest sections of white

With a little bit of effort here is how this photo can lookWith wedding photography you get what you pay for.  If your cousin just got out of photo school and you want to help them out by letting them shoot your wedding which will be their first wedding remember that there are no do-overs.  If the detail of the photo is lost or the settings are off for that situation there is very little photoshop can do to help recover those images.

So when you are looking through photos, look a bit more critically at the wedding photos you’re looking at because these will mimic what you will be looking at on your walls for the rest of your lives together.

The fake smile is one of my all time favorites when taking pictures of people.  Everybody has what I am going to call a “fake” smile and a “real” smile.  The fake smile is the one you have been making all your life when someone holds up a camera and says “smile for the camera” or “cheese” and you are supposed to smile (which actually means look really awkward) and they take a picture.  The real smile is probably the one you are making right now while thinking about your fake smile.  From the moment a camera is first pointed at us, we are trained to put on this fake smile and look at the camera.  By the time our wedding day comes this thought is so ingrained into our actions that without proper guidance all of your photos will include all of the subjects looking into the lens of the camera which means that all the pictures on your wall would be you, looking back at yourself.  I don’t think that makes for very good memories or wedding photos.

This is an image/advertisement I came across which I thought was funny, but also rather true.

This is obviously a really bad case picture but unfortunately I have seen similar pictures presented as real wedding photos.

I would like to show you the difference between real smiles and fake smiles in wedding photography.

This next sequence of three different images were taken at the same location.  Prior to the first image I had them interacting with each other, talking, laughing a bit and then I asked them to look towards me and this is the image I got.

I like the location where this picture is taken and I like the picture except for their smiles.  There is no feeling in their smiles, there is no passion, no romance, no love for one another.  They looked at the camera and without hesitation smiled for that camera, but unfortunately this is not what I was looking for.

I spoke to them a few encouraging words, I don’t remember exactly what I said but I used their relationship by prompting him to tell his wife something joyous or funny and this next image shows the love and the joy they have together.

When you look at these two faces side by side there is no comparison

The picture on the left is the fake smile for this bride.  The photo on the right is the person that her husband knows and loves.  This is the face he sees when he makes her smile or laugh.  This is the face he can look at even when she’s not there with him and smile back at her and feel the love that he has for his wife every time he sees that image.

Without experience at weddings and experience working with people and building relationships with them these pictures will be few and far between.  This is why it is so important for a bride and groom to trust their photographer and so important for the wedding photographer to create an atmosphere that is comfortable and relaxing so that your photos show your natural feelings that you share with each other.

If you want to have natural photos for your wedding it is important for you to hire someone who can guide you to show your emotions during the photo shoot.  It is important for the photographer to capture the emotions during the ceremony and during the reception but the most challenging time is during the one on one between the couple and the photographer.  Most people don’t get in front of a camera everyday and some feel awkward when they know they are there to be photographed, but when there is somebody who can guide you, make you feel comfortable and get beautiful results which capture the real you to remember forever, it is worth every penny.