How to Find a Wedding Photographer

After booking the reception venue, finding a photographer was the most important/stressful task on my wedding to do list. I'm an extremely nostalgic person (just thinking about how there will never be a new episode of Charmed again makes me tear up), so I know I'll be looking back at our wedding pics all the time after it's all said and done.

Image source

My 2 fave things: weddings and Charmed. By the way I kind of love her dress.

I'm also worried about PWD--I took a quiz in Brides magazine to see if I was susceptible and I am!--but I think having lots of amazing wedding pics to peruse after it's over will help a lot with that. They're the only tangible thing leftover from the day (actually that's not true at all--what about the dress that you can never wear again, the favors that guests left behind, the dying centerpieces, the freezer-burnt top tier, and all the other junk I'll have to haul back home and figure out what to do with?) so they're pretty important.

Personal pic

I don't want to be making this face after the wedding!

To begin this part of the wedding planning, I turned to Google docs, natch (no, they don't pay me to promote them. But they should! I could do so much for their exposure! [that was sarcasm]). The tab was artistically titled "Photographers," and it included cells for name, email address, website, date contacted (very important for all Google doc spreadsheets for vendors!! Especially if your email client deletes things at will!), and a bunch of other cells.

I blurred out the names in case some of my data was incorrect, or if they've changed their policies since I created this doc. There are a lot of question marks in this spreadsheet so I didn't want any vendors to get pee-issed at me. 

As you can see, before you can decide who would make a good photographer, you have to decide what you want in a wedding photographer. Here's what I (we!) wanted:

1. The entire package had to be $2,000 or less.
2. We needed 10 hours of coverage, from getting ready to our send-off at the end of the night.
3. We wanted 2 photographers, or at least the option of adding a 2nd shooter (while staying under budget).
4. Similarly, we wanted an engagement session, either included or tacked on for a price under budget.
5. I also wanted rights to the photos because I wanted to be able to edit them, post them all over the innanet (like here, for example), and most importantly, print them at the cheapest photo printing place I could find (Hi, Walgreens! Hey there, Vistaprint! Wassup, Shutterfly?)
6. Surprisingly enough, we didn't want prints or an album included. I'd much rather get a cheaper package without any actual prints or album than pay more for an overpriced photo book that I could make myself for cheaper (be prepared to hear a lot of that nonsense throughout my posts, by the way). I've heard of people spending more than $800 on a wedding album! While I get that those albums are extremely well made, and I did just rhapsodize about how important photos are to me, above, I don't really care that much about the quality of the album (at least, not $800 worth).

We also included cells in the Google doc for our opinion of the person's photos. This is most people's main concern when booking a wedding photographer, but to be honest I didn't have much of an opinion about it. Most wedding photography looks the same to me as long as it's done professionally, and I usually just get caught up in the content of the pics, rather than the photographer's composition/skills/what have you.

Photo source

This is my idea of a bad wedding photo. Then again, if the bride weren't riding the groom like a damn animal, the pic might be quite lovely.

So this was more of Mr. Unicycle's domain because he is really into photography from a photographer's standpoint. He likes to take pics of flowers and spiders and junk, so he knew what to look for more than me. (True story: when we finally met our photographer, I asked her if her black and white pics were shot that way or if she photoshopped them. Mr. Unicycle laughed at me because apparently you don't take digital pics in black and white. Who knew? Uh, everyone except me, apparently.)

So after I scoured The Knot, Wedding Wire, Weddingbee, Google, and even some old fashioned magazines for photographer listings, emailed everyone, and filled in my precious Google doc, it was time to figure out who met enough of our criteria to warrant a meeting...

(the ellipses mean "to be continued.")


What is/was most important to you in a wedding photographer?