After about 12 mths thinking about it, I’ve finally decided to venture over to the dark side and create a blog...!
So with that monumental decision out of the way, my next problem was what would be my first topic? Well after my experience last week, that was an easy one - Beware Cheap Wedding Photographers..!
Last week alone I was contacted by 3 different couples (thats I think 11 so far this year) who had hired a cheap wedding photographer for their wedding and were now having to contact myself and other professional photographers to see if we could ‘fix’ the photographs that they paid for. This has always been an issue but in the past few years it seems to have become fairly widespread. There appears to be a growing number of people out there who think they can make an easy buck by becoming a wedding photographer. They buy an entry level SLR camera with a flashgun and a couple of cheap plastic lenses and suddenly, hey presto they are a wedding photographer. The notion of low entry costs to set yourself up as a photographer is ridiculous. To set up properly costs at least €20,000 and thats just for the bare necessities to be mobile such as a wedding photographer. After seeing some of the images from the couples I was shocked to say the least by what was produced. It demonstrated that the so called photographers who took the photographs used substandard equipment, did not know how to use their camera and certainly did not understand composition or lighting.
I could go on an on here but I wont. Its a free country and we are free to decide what service providers we wish to use for our special occasions. If I can give any advice regarding choosing a wedding photographer, it would be to look for those who are qualified, insured and VAT registered (all IPPA registered photographers are). Meet with your photographer and make sure that you would be comfortable working with him or her before making your decision. Ask if examples of their wedding images are actually from real weddings!! In many cases fantastic images of brides used to advertise a wedding photographer are not from a real wedding. Instead a model has been hired in, a fantastic venue hired and an hour has been spent setting up to shoot just one photograph. Thats all great, but those rules don’t apply to a real wedding.
Beware of photographers who will just give out a mobile phone number and an email address. Be very aware of photographers who do not have a professional looking website or even worse have no website and use flickr or other photo sharing websites to display their work.
Ultimately like everything in life, quality comes at a price. However, it does not have to be grossly expensive either and I believe in fair pricing. Consider that whatever price a photographer is quoting, it has to reflect not just his or her time on the day of your wedding but the time spent digitally processing each image afterwards. As a rule of thumb, 6 hours photographic wedding coverage will result in up to an additional 12 hours of post production.
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