Bride Series: How to Choose a Wedding Photographer

This is a blog series that I have been working on in the past few weeks. The first one will be about how to choose your wedding photographer. I will try to be as short and informative as possible here. Drawing facts from my past experience as a bride looking for a wedding photographer and from observing client-vendor relationships that we had with our clients.

1. Personality match

When we chose our wedding photographer, we arranged meetings with different photographers to see their works and products they offered. It did not occur to us right away that to meet and know them in person has a deeper value for our day. At the end, we ended up booking and working with Leslie from Sakura Photography. One of our friends had their wedding covered by her too and for awhile I thought maybe that was one of the reasons why I chose her: connection. But looking back, that is not the case. We met at a bubble tea place and it was Leslie’s choice. We asked her why at the meeting and she told us about her travel and stay in Asia. We ended up talking about our travel experiences around the world. We did not talk about the wedding and look at her other weddings until closer to the end. We were already connected from the beginning of the conversation about our passion to travel, experience new culture and have friends around the world.

* Make sure that both of you love your photographer in person. They will be around you for the whole day and the last thing you want is you don’t enjoy having them around your family and friends.

2. Connected to their work

We have been blessed that we have worked with clients who love our work and trust us fully on the day. I have heard horror stories of clients questioning my photographer friends on their suggestions for locations. When you see the photographer’s work, make sure you love it and you are connected to the moments and images they have captured. It is important to like their approach on moments and creating images because you want to be able to trust them to do the work for you on your big day. Your wedding photos will be your heirloom to your kids and grandkids and you want photographers that best represent your ecstatic. You also have to know that as an artist, your photographer’s work will keep evolving so if you like how they capture the emotion and interaction in their images, you have your ground covered.

* Make sure you are connected to the images in your photographer’s portfolio. The emotion and interaction in their images will be the base of how they will deliver your expectation on your wedding day and how you want your love story to be told.

As I observe more client-vendor relationship and look back to our wedding day, this list will grow longer. I will make sure this is a to-be-continued project in my list to help readers find their best-matched wedding photographer for their big day. I love to tell stories and I will close this post with a story from one of my brides: Rebekah. Rebekah and I did not get a chance to meet in person as we live in different provinces. I have a requirement that I need to meet my prospective brides in person and Skype was not an option for us at that time so we had a phone interview. When I said an interview, it is a two way interview. It is important for me to know that she is my bride too. The fact is, I live by what all my mentors have told me that not all brides out there are for me and not me for them. Reb and I hit it off right away. We love the same TV shows (I didn’t know how we got there by the way), I love her passion for Ethan (her husband now) and her family, she loves my approach on situations in weddings, everything. We intended to have a 30 minutes phone conversation and when we were done, it was an hour and fifteen minutes! I felt that I just had a conversation with my highschool bestfriend. I know the feeling was mutual because on the wedding day, all her families know me as her-photographer-sent-from-heaven. How sweet is that. I love the fact that I have been able to serve brides that have trusted me to do my job and thus, I am able to deliver the expectation and more.

I hope you all find this is informative and insightful.

~ Love,

Jennifer ~

EDIT: The picture attached to this blogpost was taken by Sakura Photography. It is only appropriate that we show one of our wedding pictures as a link to this post. 🙂 That moment that we had in the image is also why we hired her! 

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