Getting a real wedding photographer may be considered rather optional until it gets too late and you receive your wedding pictures.
What do you expect from your wedding photographer
That is easy: to deliver great wedding images and not to miss any important moments.
Wedding photography is a difficult combination of reportage and studio photography so a real wedding photographer should have press photography skills to be able to follow the action and studio experience to be able to creatively use the light during church and formal shots.
A good wedding photographer has quality photographic equipment which allow getting the best possible images in the fast moving conditions of a wedding and back-up gear for any unexpected situation, so your wedding images will get done no matter what.
In a word, a serious wedding photographer is the best insurance for getting your wedding pictures as you imagined them.
How to choose a wedding photographer
First, you should like his/her portfolio. The portfolio can be presented either as an Internet site or as a set of images you will see during the first meeting.
Ideally, you should ask to see a complete wedding coverage, not only the best images done in the whole career of the photographer.
A complete coverage will tell you much more about what you should expect from your wedding images.
Than, you should carefully analyze the financial aspects, how long the photographer will attend your wedding and how blond it will take to get the images after the wedding.
Especially, you should pay attention at this king of "offers":
Just 1€ / picture |
Because you may end up paying 500 € in cash for 250 pictures, 4"x6" (10x15cm), in double, and you may even don't like all the images.
What you may find on the photo market
The photography market in Romania is not fully established, both because economic factors and the public perception that photography can be done anytime by anybody.
Of course, this impression lasts just until one receives the images taken by a casual photographer.
Amateur photographers - friends and relatives
A lot of camera owners may think that doing wedding photography for their friends is a piece of cake.
Certainly, any of them may get a few very nice images, and with a bit of luck, assembling the images from all your friends you may get a set
But only if you are sure to get lucky in a situation as unique as your wedding.
But the images taken by your friends acting as casual wedding photographers may be important to complete the whole mood of the wedding and some personal moments which can not be covered by the official photographer.
Professional photographers doing weddings in their own time
A lot of them are press photographers hired at newspapers and they have the equipment provided by their employer.
Most of them are capable to decently photograph an event so the reportage part of your wedding will be covered pretty well.
Another advantage of this approach is that some of these photographers can be hired at very affordable prices, since they do not have to buy their gear and do not pay any taxes for their wedding photography services, as opposed to the freelance photographers which run their own company.
On the other hand, the press photographers can be sent in the last minute to cover an important event exactly in your wedding day, and this may represent a slight risk.
And most of them are quite busy with their day job and are happy to download the images into the computer and burn them on a CD to deliver, so usually no post processing will be done on your wedding photographs.
Full time wedding photographers
Theoretically, those should be the best to photograph your wedding.
First, you should concentrate on the portfolio an than double check the financial details.
If the prices are really low, you should be aware that the photographer may not afford high quality equipment, not to mention back-ups, which may reflect on the quality of images from your wedding.
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