I really feel for the couple in question. They did their research, visiting several wedding fairs, paid for a professional service on their big day, and have ultimately been let down. These memories can’t be restaged.

It really just goes to show the importance of choosing the right photographer for your wedding. If you don’t have friends who can give you a recommendation, you can give yourself the best chance of finding a reputable photographer by starting your search with industry organisations such as the Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers, or the Association of Wedding Photojournalists.

In any case, ask lots of questions (some ideas in a previous post here), make sure sample albums contain the photographer’s own work, and most of all – trust your gut instincts! If you don’t have total confidence in someone, walk away.

Let’s be careful out there.

But once you’ve got your shortlist, these basic guidelines don’t really get to the core of what you should be looking for. They’re too mechanical. Choosing a wedding photographer should be an emotional decision – after all, you’re trusting someone to capture some of your most important memories and emotions.

So what is the key factor? Simple. It’s click. Rapport. Connection.

Once all the boxes are ticked (pricing, experience, availability), you need to know that your photographer really gets you. This has to go deeper than someone with a friendly smile and a firm handshake. Someone is going to be creating memories of the most important day of your life. If their aesthetic, or sense of humour, or basic view of the world don’t sync with yours, those images are going to jar whenever you see them. Your wedding memories are going to feel like someone else’s.

I believe that there are three areas you should look at.

Firstly, there’s the way that the photographer communicates in their marketing. Anyone that publishes a website or a brochure is sending messages about who they are, and how they want to represent themselves. How do you feel about their style, their tone, their approach to design? Are you excited, intrigued, amused? Or are you irritated, impatient, bored?

Secondly, when you meet in person, the conversation should flow naturally. If it feels like you’re being blasted by a sales pitch, something’s wrong. The meeting ought to be a relaxing experience, where their confidence gives you a sense of security. You may not be looking for a new best friend, but you should like and trust this person. And on top of that, you should be able to sense that they’re excited about your venue, your funky cake, and your eight-piece soul band, and touched by your great-aunt flying in from New Zealand.

Thirdly, you should feel great about the sample products they show. The images should have the emotional punch you’d like in your own. The quality of the albums should make you enjoy handling them. The page designs should be satisfying. The stories should leap off the pages. Does the style feel like a natural extension of their brochure, their website, their conversation? Does it feel natural to you?

If all these factors are in place, you’ll know you’ve found the right person to photograph your wedding. Listen to your instinct. Trust them to capture your unique moments. Trust them to tell your story. Trust them to create your memories.

Michelle is absolutely right. You’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money to hire a team of professionals for your wedding – so let them do their jobs. Unexpected things happen, but if you’ve got people around you that you completely trust, let them do the worrying! Your job is to relax, spend time with each other, have fun with your guests. Try and stay in the moment.  Take it all in, and let the day unfold in its own way.

Well, this is an old topic, but here’s my take on it. The wedding day is hugely important. An extraordinary amount of time will have gone into planning every tiny detail, not to mention the thousands of pounds spent. Enough Bargain Buckets and Viennettas have been ordered to feed all your guests. People may be travelling from far and wide to share the celebrations. It’s a unique day, never to be repeated, and you want photographs to help you relive it.

So, who will you trust to provide the photographs of this hugely important one-off event? On one end of the spectrum, there’s your cousin Barry who owns one of those expensive digital SLR cameras. He’s done some fantastic photos from his round the world trip. He’s got the gear, and he clearly knows how to take photos, so he’s bound to do a great job of the wedding…right?

Well, no. Wedding photography is unique. So although cousin Barry might have some fantastic landscapes from the Australian outback, do you really know how good he is at photographing things that move? If he drops his camera on the way to the ceremony, does he have a backup – or is that game over for your photos? Can he design and provide a professional quality album? In short, do you actually know what you’re going to get? You may be lucky…but then again, you may not. How much of a risk are you willing to take?

On the other end of the spectrum, a seasoned pro can show you, in advance, EXACTLY the sort of thing you can expect. You can see images and testimonials from previous weddings, so you know he can actually cope with your fast paced, demanding event and still produce meaningful images. He will have backup equipment, and even backup photographers, so you know he can cope with emergencies and not let you down. And he’ll work with professional labs and album manufacturers, unlike cousin Barry, so you know your memories will be properly presented and stored. He can do all this because he has invested years, and thousands of pounds, working on his photographic technique, putting all the equipment together, gaining membership in industry associations, and building relationships with professional suppliers.

And by the way, a wedding photographer’s work goes far beyond the wedding day itself. Post-processing, album design, print ordering, framing, uploading…it’s more likely to be anything up to 5 days work per wedding. Cousin Barry may not have thought that through, and you may not even see any photos for months. A pro will tell you when to expect your images. He can do this because he has invested time in developing an efficient workflow that ensures you will see your photographs as quickly as possible.

The result is that once you sign a contract with your wedding photographer, you can tick it off your list and move on to the next item. It’s taken care of. You know what to expect, and when to expect it. The value you place on that feeling of confidence depends on a combination of your risk appetite, your budget, and the value you place on photography. Whether the answer is £100 or £10,000, there are photographers who will gladly take your money. Just make sure you fully understand, and are happy, with what you’re getting in return.

There are 3 main types. The first, and most traditional, is called a matted album. If you look at your grandparents’ wedding album, it’s most likely to be in this style. Matted album pages are made up of 2 parts; the actual print, with a thick card layer (the matte) fixed on top. You view the images through apertures cut into the matte, which is typically black or cream/white. So the album pages are pretty thick, especially if they’re protected by metal page corners. Matted albums have a couple of advantages. Firstly, the mat protects the prints when the book is closed, and the pages will tend to have a more classic, traditional style, so they’ll last well. Secondly, most matted albums will lay flat when opened, so that you can view 2 sides at a time. The downside is that because each side is assembled separately, you can’t have images going across the book gutter, which reduces the visual impact.

Secondly we have coffee table books. This is a much more contemporary style album that is inspired by the publishing world, and it has glossy paper pages that mimic modern fashion magazines. Pages can contain a huge range of design elements – multiple images fading into each other, text or graphics, colourful backgrounds, or anything your album designer can dream of. That’s the main advantage of coffee table books; the pages can be designed exactly as you want them. They can be minimalist or complex, traditional or contemporary, colourful or mono, and any combination of these throughout the book. Unfortunately, that’s also the main disadvantage; the funky graphics you love this year might make you cringe in 5, 15 and 25 years’ time. Also, these books tend not to lie completely flat, which also reduces their visual impact. And those thin pages are bound to be more prone to wear and tear than thick matted pages.

Thirdly, there’s a hybrid style of album called flushmount. It basically combines the thick pages of the matted album with the design flexibility of the coffee table. A flushmount page is a single print that is permanently glued onto a thick page. Depending on the specific manufacturer, this may be a double spread or a single side. The advantages are that they tend to lie flat when opened, so you can fully appreciate a double spread, and you can also print right across the gutter so that you can have images across a full double spread. The disadvantage with most flushmount manufacturers use a printing process where over time, as the book is opened and closed, a discoloured stripe (usually blue or pink) may appear in the gutter.
I’ll come clean and say that currently, I exclusively offer flushmount albums. They are seriously high quality, with beautiful leather covers, and I have found one of the very few manufacturers that print completely seamlessly across the gutter – you get massive double spread images that leap off the page. They really showcase your images, tell the stories of the day without restrictions, and because my page designs are very clean, they’ll date well (though I can’t make the same promise about your outfit!). I believe that flushmount albums offer the best of all worlds, which is what such an important set of memories deserves.

The fact is that wedding photographers recognise that a couple’s wedding day is one of the most significant events in their lives. Family and friends may well have travelled great distances to attend, and in some cases it will never again be possible to capture specific groups. Almost every couple, when it comes down to it, will want some formal posed photographs from their day.

The trick is to get the important formal shots without wrecking the flow of the day. Personally, I always make sure the bride and groom understand how long it will take to get through their list of must-haves. They usually settle on around 5 or 6 groups, which should take up to 25 minutes or so. Longer than that and they’re going to be missing the good stuff!

Here is a list of questions that any dependable professional photographer will be happy and ready to answer. You may not care about all of them. There are no right or wrong answers. The main thing is that you are totally confident that you can tick photography off the ‘to-do’ list, that your wedding images are going to be incredible, and that you are dealing with a reliable individual that will absolutely deliver as agreed. Oh, and that you actually click (arf arf) with your chosen shooter. That’s really important, because if you get on with him/her/it/them, your wedding images have a much better chance of feeling like your own memories. Which is nice.

Anyway, onto the questions, which I have categorised for your enjoyment and convenience.

Photography

• How would you describe your photography?
• Do you shoot color or black and white?
• What’s your approach to the formal photographs?
• How many pictures do you take?
• What is post-processing?
• What post-processing work do you do?

Professionalism

• Do you belong to any photography organisations?
• What insurance do you have?
• What type of equipment do you use?
• Do you carry backup equipment?
• If we book you, will you actually shoot our wedding?
• How many weddings have you shot as primary photographer?
• Will you photograph another wedding on our wedding day?
• What happens if you are ill and cannot shoot our wedding?
• How do we book you for our wedding day?
• What if we decide to change our wedding date?
• Where are you based?
• Are you willing to travel?

Products

• When will we see our images?
• How many images should we expect to see from our wedding?
• Do you provide digital files?
• Who designs your albums?
• Can you show us a sample album?
• Can we see an entire wedding?

Pricing

• Does your price include an album?
• How do we pay you?
• When do we pay you?
• Why is wedding photography so expensive?

Personality

• Why do you do this?
• What’s your favourite part of the day?
• What was your favourite part of your own wedding?
• What’s your favourite colour?
• Where do babies come from?
• What’s the best mortgage for us?

If you want to know my answers to these questions (and anything else keeping you awake at night), then feel free to arrange a meeting with me and I will happily tell all…although if you don’t know the answer to the babies one, planning a wedding may not necessarily be the best thing for you just yet.

The risk with wedding photography is that if you’re not translating the slang in the same way as your photographer, you may not get the shots, or the products, or the experience you were expecting. You can’t exactly re-shoot a wedding, either…so that’s why I’m going to blog about my own approach to wedding photography. I want my clients to be absolutely crystal clear about what I do, how I do it, and how they benefit. Ambiguity doesn’t work with wedding photos.

This post will be about styles of wedding photography. Firstly we have the ‘traditional’ style. This largely  consists of posed, formal photographs, directed by the photographer. The subjects will mostly be looking at the camera. The advantage of this style is that you get formal shots of a formal event, and useful records of the people that you spent your day with. The disadvantage is that if you give your photographer a long list of groups to shoot, you can be standing around for a couple of hours while your guests eat all the best canapes and your smile turns into a fixed grimace. I speak from personal experience, having once been that bored groom! Not enjoying the whole of your wedding day doesn’t seem right to me.

Next up is the ‘fashion’ or ‘contemporary’, or even ‘contemporary directed’ style. This is an evolution of the traditional style, and is heavily influenced by fashion magazine ads. Your photographer will do clever things with settings, lighting and posing to make you look superb. They may well create moments in order to get emotional shots. In short, your wedding images will look like as near to a perfume ad as you can get without paying Hollywood actresses to talk b*ll*cks on top of fake disused warehouses. The advantage is that you’ll look amazing. The disadvantage is that the photos will draw attention to themselves, will be as much about the photographer as they are about you, and are likely to date relatively quickly. Your cutting-edge wedding may be making you cringe within 5 years.

Lastly we have the ‘reportage’, or ‘documentary’, or ‘photojournalistic’ style. The key ingredient here is a hands-off photographer, who records events with minimal intrusion. You won’t be told to say cheese or look at the birdy. It’s about the little stories that occur when people are being themselves, and it’s about showing the real emotions that people express when they’re in the moment. The advantage of documentary photography is that the images are all about you and your guests sharing your big day, and carry a much greater impact every time you see them. The disadvantage is that it’s really hard to do well. You need great empathy, flawless camera technique, photographic vision, and the timing to bring it all together in a split-second, before the moment passes for ever. This is the style that I offer.

I aim to take images that get out of the way. They let you relive all those little stories without concentrating on MY photography. They don’t date, they don’t draw attention to themselves, and they simply focus on you. Of course I do a few posed shots and portraits. Everyone expects them, they add texture and richness to the album, and they’re fun – but the key is to not let them disturb the flow of the day that you’ve spent so much time and effort to plan (and pay for!).

Here’s one you couldn’t direct or reshoot. It’s just a case of being ready at the right time: