Complete guide to search a wedding photographer

In-depth guide to select a wedding photographer.

Updated 2021

If you are looking for some hacks & Tips to help your search for the perfect wedding photographer, sit back and read. First, many congratulations to you! I am so glad you are here. I got you all covered. This is an in-depth guide covering possibly all the angles, points to remember, things to do and not to do while searching for the best wedding photographer, suitable to your taste. I will share all the points below. Do share your thoughts, any possible add ons that you feel should be included in the guide, in the comments section.

1. Dedicated office space

Ensuring your wedding photographer has a dedicated office space to work with his team is very important. Why? One might wonder. Because it impacts quite a lot of factors like

On-time delivery
- Delivering a wedding project requires a team of shooters (To shoot the event), editors (to edit the content), and managers (to manage the workflow). While all this can be done by a single person alone, it would slow down the process quite a bit. Just for an idea, any usual wedding company does 3-5 weddings in a month. For any business to sustain and be profitable, that’s the least number! If one person will be handling all the shooting, editing, and management, delivery times are bound to get delayed.

Consistent quality

- If your wedding photographer has a dedicated space for editors, it would be easier and quicker to perform a quality check. Also, the editors who are dedicatedly working for one company, better represent and know the brand’s style & preferences for their content.

- Photographers who hire/outsource the editing work to freelance editors, run into consistency problems quite fairly. Freelance editors work on projects and are paid per project. They work with different vendors and cater to different needs and styles from photographers. It thus becomes quite a task for the freelance editors to deliver consistent results. They sure do get the work done quickly, but the quality is unmatched to that of a dedicated photo editor.

Trust

- To be able to have a dedicated space for business is quite challenging. In addition to incurring a fixed cost of business every month, the company also needs to ensure a constant inflow of work and profits. This is a sign that the photographer must have been delivering consistent quality work to the clients. Furthermore, such photographers also deliver exceptional services because their physical location is known to you, your friends, and everyone. They are a public figure and they need to maintain the reputation of their brand.

2. Contracts offered

Another very important point to check while selecting your wedding photographer is to ask for their contracts. Contracts can be by mail or paper. Usually shared with clients via photographer’s business mail, a contract should mention the following

Finalized package cost,
Quantity of all the deliverable,
Team details working on the project,
Details of all the functions agreed upon to be covered.
Process and medium of delivery.
Schedule and mode of Payments.
Terms and conditions of the photographer working on the project

Contracts act as an important piece of information and reference point, after the wedding. A wedding project is huge involving a lot of vendors, not just a photographer. Hence it’s quite easy to lose track of the payments made, agreed deliverables, etc. In case of any doubts from either of the two, photographer and/or the customers, the contract serves as a useful reference.

3. RAW vs JPEGS

When availing of photography services, be careful to ask and ensure the photographer clicks photos in RAW format.

When you click photos on your phone, they usually end with a .JPG/.JPEG extension. But there’s one more format called the RAW format available on DSLRs/mirrorless cameras and/or any professional camera. RAW format files have different extensions based on the camera used, to produce the image. Shared below are the extension names for different camera brands. RAW format reveals the true potential for editing a photograph. In simple terms, JPEG files are smaller and hence can stretch only to a certain limit while RAW files are meant for editing. They are bigger and can be used quite usefully to edit photographs.

As should be obvious, RAW format files are also bigger. A RAW file can be 3-5 times bigger in size compared to its JPEG version.

4. Backup practices

A large percentage of the wedding photographs these days are handed over digitally. Any piece of digital data is subject to a risk of data corruption and/or loss. Hence, it’s extremely important to ask your photographer about the backup policy he/she maintains for all the work they do.
How does it impact you, the customer though? You would never want to be in a condition, where you lose all the memories, or a certain percentage of your wedding photographs just because the photographer did not maintain enough backups or due to a technical fault.

Hence, when selecting your wedding photographer, ask for at least two copies of data to be maintained. As a usual good practice, good vendors either maintain at least one master and a second backup copy at their end or one master copy at their end while a second copy on a client’s hard disk.

5. In-house Team vs. Freelance Teams

In-house team means the photographer has a fixed team that he works with on every project. Freelance teams mean the photographer hires other photographers/videographers/cinematographers to shoot with him/her on the project. Freelance vendors work with multiple photography companies. Hence, might not be available to shoot with the photographer at each wedding. Which one’s better though? Read on.

Any photographer that maintains an in-house photography team, got to be darn expensive but super creative and consistent in his work. Weddings are huge in terms of coverage. The team would know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Say, one team member is good at handling gatherings while the other is amazingly well at capturing portraits. Well-coordinated teams perform better.

Freelance teams however offer a lot more flexibility.

If your wedding photography budget is not well above 2.5-3 Lakhs, chances are the photographer would offer you a team with freelancers. In that case, if they have a fixed photo editor, you are good to go.

6. Work Experience: Photography vs Business

Both are completely different and important in their ways. For you, the one getting married must lookout for this one important detail.

The contact person at the photography company may or may not be the actual shooter of the content that’s present on their website but a very good salesperson. They might have excellent business experience but have little to no knowledge of photography and vice versa.

When making a booking with a photographer/photography company, ask for the team who’s going to be shooting at the wedding, perhaps a few galleries from the same photographer. If the owner is a photographer himself, it’s great.

For it is the photographer’s vision, that sells the actual photographs.

7. Shooting style and knowledge

The first thing that attracts and pulls you to a photographer’s social media page and/or website is the content that he shares. However, most social media is just the icing on the cake. Any wedding offers a lot of stories, emotions, moods, people, and opportunities to make photographs. Just as an example, any avg wedding deliverable may have around 2000-3000+ edited photographs. The ones shared on Instagram are a handful of 10 images at max, from one wedding. To truly understand how learned a photographer is and his knowledge/expertise is, look at his/her shots in different lighting conditions.

Outdoors in bright sunlight

In shade

In dark

At the golden hour 4-6 pm

On a rainy day

On a cloudy day

Indoors at night

If a photographer’s portfolio features shots from all of these areas, and you are still wowed by all the shots that you see, congratulate yourself for an amazing kickass photographer discovery!

8. Full wedding/Pre-wedding galleries.

The secret sauce to a mind-blowing wedding gallery image collection is variety! Think of the last trip /vacation that you took. If I were to ask you, what all fun did you have at the vacation, you would have tons of stories to share, right? Wedding galleries are similar. A wedding photographer’s job is not just to document the people who attended the wedding, but to share moments you can cherish for a lifetime! Emotions that you experienced, felt deep inside. To help you relive them, with the photographs.

When you want to finalize the photographer, look at the full wedding galleries for sure. Do you see not just people smiling but actual moments that make you smile, laugh, adore, feel your throat heavy? You, my friend, have hit the jackpot.

The shooting style may vary. The photographer might be into creating dark moody shots, or bright happy shots, or fine art fiction-looking shots, but each one of them will showcase stories as one common point.

So choose the ideal style that you like, dark & Moody, or bright & airy that has the secret sauce.

9. Number of changes offered in the wedding videos.

I am sharing a very deep and insightful tip with the readers of this blog. Something which other vendors would not even like. But this is what separates a great vendor. We like to keep things transparent.

No matter what a vendor tells you. No one in the world can deliver a wedding film which you would like 100% instantly. Well, there are once in blue moon scenarios but the major times, the reality is, you would want certain changes.

Like you want to see that moment when your mom hugged you while you were crying at vidai or a closer shot of when dad hugged you at entry instead of a wide shot.

When hiring a photographer for your wedding film, ask him how many change hops will he offer. If you’re looking at a 200k plus package, don’t settle for anything less. You as a customer are buying a service, not just a film. Quite a few vendors offer only two hops and mention they would charge extra for additional changes. Ideally, a vendor must edit all the changes which make the film best suitable for you. No questions asked.

10. Ask for the photographer’s website

You just started looking out for a wedding photographer and hell, there are so many photographers out there. Each one sharing their Instagram handles and video samples with you. How on earth would you even filter them? They do look similar, don’t they!

A good way to filter experienced wedding photographers from the new ones is to look at their websites.

Like any other business, the wedding photography business also has different areas to maintain to ensure smooth business flow. Presenting photographs and portfolios to the clients is just the face of it. While new photographers can set up social media presence fairly quick, for instance, a Facebook page and an Instagram handle, maintaining a website is tough.

Firstly, because it demands an additional website team along with the photography team. Secondly, because it takes a lot of effort to curate full galleries and write blog posts. Also, it takes time to build trust with clients, and hence generate full galleries worth sharing on the website.

If you come across any one-page website which looks similar to an Instagram handle, with a few photos & videos, and a few customer reviews, you can probably keep those photographers somewhere in the middle of the priority list. They would probably by experience be trying to make things work on the business end, but are not quite there yet.

Websites that have at least 10-20 galleries including a few blog posts about general questions customers have, like this blog post on how to find a wedding photographer, indicates a vendor who has been into the business for long and whom you can safely trust.

11. Track content growth.

Possibly the most useful secret tip while selecting a wedding photographer, is to understand the intent of the photographer. You can hire any photographer out there, but how would you gauge their intent towards their work. Photography is after all how creative one can be. To push their creative limits on every project, to bring out the best.
So here’s the secret. After you make a priority list of the photographers you would want to hire, an easy check for understanding their love of work is to look at their Instagram/website/wedding galleries bottom to top and/or old to new.
If the photographer has been putting all his knowledge and efforts into every project, you will probably be able to see that in his work too. New galleries becoming better in terms of storytelling, technique, edits, etc.

12. Package options.

Now that you know of possibly all the variations and options when looking for a wedding photographer, it would be easier to understand what the photographer is offering and whether the cost and services are worth it.

However, you would find vendors offering the same services and packages with the same fancy terms but charging differently.

So to break it down for you all, a good wedding photography package that would deliver not just a good set of photos and videos, but also deliver the unseen and give good customer experience, i.e. the avg package would cost 60-80k INR per day, at least.

If you have three days for coverage, avg cost would be 60*3 = 180k to 80*3= 240k INR, i.e. between 180-240k INR

13. Covid rules/inclusions for wedding

Covid has impacted the entire wedding industry, not just for photographers but the people in general too. With the unpredictable curfews and lockdowns happening any day, there are a lot of risks involved in booking services.
Ensure your wedding photographer adds a Covid clause in the contract. Any good wedding photographer, who’s taking an advance to block your dates, must also share clauses for cancellations and/or rescheduling, discussed and agreed upon mutually.
If you’re planning for an intimate wedding with a small gathering, or plan to rotate the guests in an hour or two, do share and discuss with your wedding photographer.

As a general recommendation, hire at least two photographers to capture the wedding.

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Written By udphotography On April 15, 2021