Sure about your photographer???... Question 1

Do you know what you are doing when hiring a photographer? You are going to sign a legal contract and trust that the pictures you will have hanging in your house for the rest of your life are going to be as good as you expect them to be. You can see what you think looks good, but do you know the right questions to ask? Allow me to give you some insider's tips that I may be frowned on for giving :)

It's time for another 'For Brides' post :) This one is going to be a good one and very much pertaining to our blog because it is about how to know if a photographer is as good as his website shows. I want our For Brides posts to be for ALL brides and not just for OUR brides, that way brides can gain from these posts whether or not they are booking us. So make sure that you tell your friends who are getting married to check these posts out because they are really great and the guy who wrote them is really funny, attractive, insightful, whatever you want to say ;)

I may be breaking photographer's code here but I am going to give you the keys to tell if a photographer is worth hiring or not. A lot of photographers just expect that you are going to look at their website and choose them based on what you think of a few pictures. They book the bulk of their weddings on this alone and great for them, I'm all for free enterprise! BUT... to make sure you hire the right photographer, you need to look deeper than this. I am going to give you a few questions to answer when looking for the right photographer for YOU no matter who you are. Be excited now :)

What most brides do is look at a photographer's website and base their decision on the external; 1. Does their website look professional? 2. Does their picture gallery look great? But brides beware... any photographer can put up 40-50 really good pictures; that isn't all that hard to do. Even Emily and I put up our 50 best pictures because that is what people are looking for; but you need to look past this if you want to guarantee you are getting the photographer you want. If you are judging a photographer on a few stunning images (and believe me, they can be REALLY great!), you may not be getting the photographer you think you are getting.

Question 1 is this; What does the rest of their stuff look like?

The best way to answer this question is to see a wedding they have done from start to finish. If they don't have a slideshow or a gallery of a single wedding on their website, then ask for a meeting and a chance to see a full wedding. This is the most important thing that should put to rest 90% of the other questions in your head (we often get questions about what gear we have, our experience, etc.. These are good questions and important things to ask, but it comes down to this... does their work speak for itself?) If you get a view of a full wedding and are still impressed, you should be well on your way to booking them!

The next best way to check out their work is to see their blog; here you can see what their current images look like. Most photographers these days have blogs to keep people's interest in their work. A lot of photographers keep the same images on their site from years ago... There isn't anything wrong with this at all! I will do this, I'm sure, with several of our images. The only thing about this is that a photographer's style can change over time. I look at pictures Emily and I took just last year and think to myself 'Our work looks so much different now!' If your photographer has a blog, check it out and see what you think! These should be the reality check for you; if you aren't liking what they have on their blog, yet you really liked what they had on their website, then my suggestion to you would be to reconsider hiring them.

Still not sure yet though? Is there still a nagging in your gut that says "I'm still not sold yet..."? Stay posted for next week's question that will help a bit more to put that worry bug to rest :)

Right now I am working on Brian and Carrie's Wedding. Here is one more of Carrie that I love!

The Best Lighting for your big day...

Happy Wednesday everyone! Here is another For Brides post that will be helpful for making sure that your pictures turn out the best. By the way, if any of you have questions for us and you want a photographer's perspective on something, write your questions in a comment. I will either write back or if I feel it's a good question for others, I will just write a whole blog post on it.

A common question we get has to do with 'when' the wedding should take place. If you are one of the many brides that are having their pictures outside, either ceremony or portraits, the sun is a very important factor. Often, couples plan their weddings and do not know to take different kinds of sunlight into consideration. I wouldn't expect them to do anything differently... I used to think that midday would be a great time for pictures until I started doing photography. The problem is that too much light and it is hard to avoid harsh lines. On the other hand, too little light and you lose some of those details. A good photographer will be able to shoot under any circumstances... we always let our couples know that regardless of when they have their wedding, their pictures are going to come out great! You will still have SOME difference in quality, however small it may be. I am writing this for ALL brides, though, whether or not they are hiring us. Some couples don't care about this, other couple do... it depends on what you prefer.

Here is what we recommend if you want the best pictures possible for your ceremony as well as your portraits. Plan on having your portraits time at the very best lighting, and give yourself enough time to get the pictures you need. For us, we always tell our couples we want a half hour with some leeway to go over a few minutes if we need to. Usually family pictures are right after the ceremony, and then the couple's session. That means that the lighting for the ceremony will be great and everything afterwards through the couple's session will be jaw-dropping :) I forgot to add this yesterday in the post... sorry :) The best lighting is from 1 hour before sunset to 15 minutes past it! Here are some examples...

Carrie's wedding... I posted this a couple days ago but it's a good example.

Notice how soft and even Jenny's skin tones are in this shot.

I like these ones of Alex and Micaela. They were feeling the rush to get back in to be with their guests, and I asked if we could have another couple minutes. So glad I did because we captured these ones which turned out to be some of the best shots of the day...

As a reassurance, a good photographer will do great no matter what... If you have already booked your entire day to have a wedding at noon, and if you do not care about the difference in quality (however small or big), then I wouldn't stress out about it. On the other hand, if pictures are the most important thing about your wedding and you want to guarantee that your friend's jaws are going to drop in jealousy, then I suggest keeping all this in mind when planning your wedding ;).

Andrew

How to Cope with the Unexpected

Emily and I have been thinking of different blog ideas that will be interesting and helpful for our readers. I thought I would just put it out there and see what people come up with that they would like to see more of or maybe something new. What do you guys think? Do you have any good blogging ideas that you would like to share with the rest of the class? :)

One idea Emily came up with is a blog series called 'For Brides'. This is a series where we give helpful tips and tricks of the industry to all brides that are planning their wedding, or even thinking of what they want their wedding to be like even though they aren't engaged yet but are planning to be soon (if only HE would ask! :). This is something that we think will help brides immensely! There is so much wisdom that can only be learned by experience and exposure to the industry. So for those ladies out there that want to hear what tips we have to give, we would love to hear what you think of our advice.

This will NOT be us telling you how to plan your wedding; instead, we will be relating our ideas to our experiences in the wedding industry and giving you another perspective that may help. Savvy? :)

Today's topic, and I think totally appropriate for our first post of this series, will help you to truly enjoy your wedding to the fullest. This is, after all, why you go through it; to have the most amazing and memorable moment of your life. I am calling today's post 'How to Cope with the Unexpected'. If you have not gone through the process of planning a wedding, you cannot fully appreciate the anxiety of it; it feels like being put through the gauntlet and hoping you survive on the other end (this is not everyone's experience, so we are speaking to those brides that DO stress about it). There are so many details and vendors to coordinate, not to mention parents, relatives, and friends that all have advice and opinions that get chimed into the whole mix. In the end, your wedding is more like a smorgasbord of details, ideas, and emotions that, if you aren't careful, will take all the fun and joy of this day that you have been thinking of since you were a little girl twirling in a summer dress.

So how do you avoid getting caught up in the chaos? Here is today's word of wisdom...

Realize that no matter how much planning you do, things never go exactly as planned. We've see both extremes; brides that just go with the flow and couldn't care less, as well as brides that have a schedule down to the last detail. Neither is wrong or right! Every wedding is different, as are the personalities of the brides and grooms. I was pretty involved in planning our wedding and helped to create an order of ceremony and reception, also delegating responsibilities to different people. In fact, Emily sometimes said I SHOULDN'T be so involved! :D Other guys are less involved in the planning; no problem! Their brides probably want to be making the decisions anyway :). In both extremes, whether completely planned out or hardly thrown together, experience shows us things go differently than planned; notice I am not saying they go WRONG, they go DIFFERENT :). The reason is that you cannot anticipate every variable so why try to? Here is our word of advice that could mean the difference between being 'pull your hair out' stressed at your wedding or 'beyond overjoyed'; don't let unanticipated things affect your overall experience on your wedding day. You can have 1 of 2 goals; you can try to force everything to go exactly as planned, or you can plan to enjoy your wedding day no matter what comes because you get to have it with the person who is most important to you in the whole world. Think about it... what really matters most; to have a flawless day but be stressed the entire time worrying that something will go wrong? Or to go into the day knowing that unexpected things will happen but it doesn't matter because you are going to laugh about it and be completely in love instead of worrying about the details. It's as simple as that... So we encourage you to choose the latter, whether or not your flourist is an hour late or even if a stray dog eats your wedding cake (God forbid this happen!! BUT... if it did, it would definitely be something to tell the grand kids :D).

Does this help? I am also curious what our married readers think about this post because they have already gone through it. Do you think this will help our brides? Thanks for reading! :)

Here's a picture of Temple with Robyn from Hawaii. I know, I should have finished editing the Hawaii pictures a while ago :). I am still finishing them, just been too busy with other photo shoots.