Hyde End Studios – Wedding Photography, Spencers Wood, Reading, Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey | Wedding Photography Hampshire | Wedding Photography Surrey

It’s not often I post these kind of sentiments because I’d much rather be positive and upbeat in my blog posts but I had a conversation this morning with yet another tearful bride devastated by the results delivered to her by her £500 wedding photographer.

I’ve had the question more than a few times now – “my photographs are dreadful – there is so much missing – is there anything you can do with them in Photoshop?” Sadly the answer is always no – garbage in – garbage out and all that. I sympathised with the bride that it’s all too easy to economise on things in the run up to the wedding (when your bank account is emptying faster than Bondi Beach during a shark attack).

It’s also all too easy to forget that the photographs will have their greatest resonance decades after the wedding (trust me, I speak from experience here). It’s also easy, if you don’t think about it too much, to forget that there is a gulf between inexperienced snappers making a few extra quid on the weekend and established professional photographers who take their vocation very seriously indeed. It’s very wise investment in my view to put a little bit more money into the photography. Averaged out over the sixty or so years after your wedding it works out pretty cheaply :)

The situation reminds of the story I heard of the hairdresser who loved his job, was the best hairdresser in town and took great pride in his work. He was quickly being put out of business by new cheap, five dollar hair cut salons that were springing all up around him. He simply could not compete, even if he did drop his price to $5 which made him feel sick to think about. After a few days trying to come up with a solution and pondering various ideas he woke up one morning with a smile and went to work.

His business started to rapidly grow and very quickly he was back on track. In the hair salon window he had put up a sign, it read:

‘We fix five dollar haircuts’.

To state the obvious, there are no re-do’s with your wedding photography – you have to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing, right from the start. Someone who has seen everything that can happen on a wedding day and work around it. Bad weather, pitch darkness, cameras that break down (it happens), timings that go rapidly wrong, wedding emergencies of all kinds – these are the things and established professional will take in his or her stride and still deliver. Speak to friends, find out what they thought about their weddings. See at least 3 photographers, ask awkward questions.

Find someone you can work with on the day and someone you have confidence in delivering the photographs that you will come to treasure when you are old and when your babies have grown up and flown the nest. Find someone who can tell the story of your day in images so that if you show them to someone who wasn’t there – they feel as if they had attended the big day and shared the joy and happiness, the tears and the the love, the conversation, the socialising and the excitement of the wedding day.

Thanks for reading. Comments as always are welcome.