"Learning From the Experts"

This week could be one of the most important topics of all! The importance of hiring a professional photographer! Time and time again I tell my clients that photography is going to be the only lasting impression you will have of your day and wouldn't you want to use someone you trust and someone you know will do a great job? Well this weeks Expert is Liz Sloan from L Photographie...check it out!

For my first guest blog, Shayna asked me to start with a basic question…why should you hire a professional wedding photographer?  My first thought?  Why wouldn’t you hire a professional wedding photographer?!  But I may be biased seeing as I AM a professional photographer.  Please read on accepting this self-proclaimed bias. 

Allow me to paraphrase the cliché which says something along the lines of “The cake will be eaten, the flowers will die and all you will have left are the photographs.”  That cliché’s got some good logic behind it!  The truth is you have more than photographs left.  If everything goes as planned, you have the love of your life to cuddle with for the rest of your time here on earth.  That is the number one reason you get married right?  (Piles of registry gifts coming in close second!) 

Your wedding day is going to fly by in the blink of an eye.  Don’t take my word for it, ask any bride.  No matter how hard you try to take it all in, so much of it will be a blur.   And if it’s a blur the next day, imagine how blurry that day becomes in say 5, 25, or even 50 years?   Photography shouldn’t MAKE the memories.  Your wedding day isn’t all about the pictures.  Photography should capture those memories so that when you look at the photographs you are immediately transported back to how you felt in that moment.  They should help you remember the blur of that one crazy awesome day in your life.  Even 50 years later.

It’s a one-time shot.  Wedding photographers don’t get do-overs.  I have shot hundreds of weddings, and this thought still makes my stomach churn with nervousness.  I spend days prepping my equipment before every single wedding.  Charging batteries, charging backup batteries and even backups to the backups.  I clean memory cards to make sure I have plenty of storage space (and yes, backups and backups of storage space) and that each and every one of them is working properly.  I have back up cameras, back up flashes and I have them in different bags incase one bag is stolen or lost while I am shooting.  I can’t tell you how many times I get in my car to drive to a wedding and pull over on the side of the road to double check one more time that nothing has been left behind.  I only have one chance to get this right. I personally wouldn’t gamble that one chance on an amateur. 

Equipment doesn’t make the photographer, but it certainly helps.  Especially at weddings which present some of the toughest lighting situations photographers ever have to deal with (candlelight ceremony anyone?!)  A professional will probably be carrying around a good $15,000 - $20,000 in the best of the best photography equipment available for what we do.  And it’s very specific to exactly what we need for weddings.  A wildlife photographer, landscape photographer, or even a studio fashion photographer owns completely different lenses, cameras and equipment than a wedding photographer.  Different situations present different needs and challenges, and we have equipment specifically suited to capture a wedding day.

Experience makes more difference than I knew until I had it.  I am so much better at what I do now than I was when I first started.  (Insert apology to early clients here!)  And I am still learning and improving nearly 10 years and hundreds of weddings later.  As far as photography disciplines go, wedding photography is certainly on the tough end of the spectrum!  It’s not as if we can set up the perfect studio lights and your photographs look consistently beautiful for the rest of the day.  Weddings move from place to place and settings need to change at the drop of a hat.  From you and your new husband laughing together in a beautiful window to grandma watching you lovingly from a dark corner of the room.  From your vows at the radiantly lit altar to your parents blotting tears in the first row of pews.   These tiny moments happen quickly and they are gone in the span of a second.  To actually get them right, that quickly, with one shot, takes practice.  And from my experience, a lot of practice. 

When it’s all said and done, you should rest easier approaching your wedding day knowing your memories are in the hands of the person best equipped to capture them.  And in my humble and somewhat biased opinion, that is a professional wedding photographer. 

Liz Sloan, L Photographie