Let’s start from the obvious – a good camera and love for photography aren’t enough for someone to call himself a wedding photographer. It takes a lot of skills and talents to be part of this photography branch.
Nowadays, choosing a photographer is on top of the wedding planning tasks list. So, let’s bust the most common myths about wedding photography. Hopefully, understanding more about wedding photography will help you pick the best photographer for your wedding.
Wedding photography is unreasonably expensive
A wedding photographer provides not only the photos but the complete customer experience to the couple and it has to cost a certain amount of money. Photographers have many expenses for the servicing equipment, paying assistants, transport, printing photographs, paying licenses to software, etc. The price includes preparations, consultations, services on the wedding day, pre or post-wedding shooting, wedding books, photos and editing.
The wedding photographer works all day on the wedding day, capturing couple moments, ceremony, party, bridal and family portraits – basically every moment of the wedding. After a full day of practice, the photographer has to edit all those images, which requires hours and hours of post-processing work.
Wedding photographer captures everything in a way you want
Yes, you can talk with your photographer about your vision of the couple photos, but you shouldn’t demand a certain style and give instructions. Some kinds of photos are just not possible under certain circumstances. For example you can not get sunny pictures if there is a rainy day outside. In this case it is more reasonable to arrange a post-wedding photo session as to ask a photographer to add the sunlight in Photoshop.
Choose the wedding photographer whose style you like and let the professional do its job. First of all, you aren’t a photography expert and you only see the final result, without knowing what kind of work someone has done to create the images you saw online.
After all, you are hiring a photographer because of his or her skills and sense of style, so you should resist being bossy and giving strict instructions.
The couple photo session is the most important part
The couple’s photo session is an important part, but there are so many moments on the wedding day that are just as valuable. Some are even more significant for capturing the atmosphere of love on that day.
If you want a photographer to capture the essence of your love and happiness on the wedding day, you can expect to see that on unstaged photos during the evening and spontaneous photos.
The bride and groom’s photo session is staged, so there isn’t much sincerity, especially if you don’t like to pose.
Shooting a wedding is easy
Being a wedding photographer is a challenging and often stressful profession. Wedding photographers have to deal with nervous couples, plenty of unknown people, and constantly focus on creativity and pulling the best from the people they photograph.
Additionally, they work the whole day on their feet, without more than a couple of minutes to rest and grab a snack! They need to carry heavy equipment on their back the whole day and be so focused, so they don’t miss any single relevant moment. They work in all weather conditions and shoot in different poses to get the best angle, which sometimes requires substantial elbow grease.
To conclude, no shooting wedding isn’t easy and it is more than just taking photos of two people holding hands surrounded by their friends and family.
Photoshop will fix it
Learn the difference between photographer and retoucher. Photograph edits the existing photos they made on the wedding day, adjusts the lights, the tones and does basic photo corrections. Then select the best from many similar photos. This process is very time-consuming.
Changing the basic structure and elements of the images or adding something in Photoshop that did not exist on the wedding day isn’t part of the editing process.
Photoshop corrections require a lot of time and they are expensive. If you want these services, be ready to pay the extra money, because very detailed retouching of images requires additional time and skills.
To become a wedding photographer, a person undergoes training and practice to gain skills, invest in quality equipment and keep up with the trends. It is a challenging, but creative job.
People who aren’t familiar with the basic principles of wedding photography believe in shallow myths about the profession and can have a hard time choosing a wedding photographer. Hopefully, the myth-busting above clarified a lot about wedding photography.
