Picking the Photographer
Thursday, October 1, 2009
We decided early on that one of the most important things to us in planning our wedding would be the photography. We wanted to make sure that we found a photographer whose style we liked and that we felt comfortable with, so that we would be fairly sure of getting the type of pictures we wanted-- relaxed portraits and plenty of good candids.
That said, neither of us knows a ton about photography, except "I like this" and "I don't like that".
We still have a limited budget, too, but we agreed that we were willing to spend a bit more on the photography if necessary to get a photographer we wanted and cut back somewhere else to make up for it.
When we were originally planning on booking in Galveston, I began researching photographers in the Galveston/Houston area. We found a few whose websites had up lots of great examples of their photography, and we decided to interview them on the weekend that we went down to Galveston to check out reception sites.
We met first with Melissa Higday of For Keeps Photography. I liked her website a lot, although the music bothered Scott a bit. But he's a web programmer. He's particular about websites. We got along with Melissa well, and I spent a good while looking through her wedding albums. I liked what I saw. I liked it a lot, in fact. Then she showed us her price sheet and my eyes just about popped out of my skull. She lists her prices on her website, but I had kept telling myself "must be too good to be true". She starts at $550 for the first two hours and $150 for every hour after that, which also includes full reproduction rights to the images, an online gallery, and a high-res CD/DVD. Needless to say, this is a much better deal than a lot of the other photographers I had looked at.
I immediately thought, "But you get what you pay for!" I was worried that if we hired her for that low, low price, we might somehow get short shrift on something. So I started asking questions. Turns out that she relocated to Texas from California relatively recently, so is still working on becoming known in this area as a wedding photographer. She confided to me that she's considering raising her prices before too much longer.
After the meeting, Scott and I went back to our hotel room to discuss it. I was impressed with her work, felt comfortable with her personally, and of course her price was amazing.
The other photographer that I had singled out to meet over that weekend was Michel (I didn't catch his last name) at Black Dress Wedding. I love, love, love their website. Something about the spirit of it spoke to me. I make no secret of the fact that I find the Wedding Industry scary. I'd like to make it through my wedding without ever once setting foot in a bridal salon. I'm not interested in seating charts, veils or garters. A lot of the wedding "frou frou" that is so "traditional" is, in fact, created out of whole cloth by the Wedding Industry, and, to tell you the truth, it's just not who we are.
That said, looking over Black Dress Wedding's website, I began to get nervous for another reason. What if our wedding wasn't as "cool" as the others I was seeing here?!
Okay, I know that was a stupid thing to think. But then I turned to their pricing page and winced. Sure, the $1500 package wouldn't be much higher than For Keeps' pricing, but it was missing something. The reproduction rights didn't come into the picture until you were at the $3600 package. Yikes! I know we had said to ourselves, "Spend what you have to to get the photographer you want," but I just wasn't sure that the extra "cool" factor of Black Dress was really worth an extra $2000, especially once I met Melissa and admired her work, too. Melissa just seemed more laid back and somehow more our style, even if she wasn't as much of a rebel against the Wedding Industry.
I talked this over with Scott that night in our hotel room. We hadn't met the guy from Black Dress yet, but we were both leaning heavily towards Melissa. I was a little worried about booking the first photographer we had met, but I'm the type of person that will start obsessing and panicking if I have too many options before me, while Scott is the type of shopper who buys the first thing he sees that he likes. Which is why we bought my ring the day after the proposal at the first store we went too (and it's gorgeous).
So we booked Melissa, and I'm happy with that decision. I do feel a little bad about making that decision before meeting with Black Dress, but I figure I have enough other things to fret about without obsessing over that.
Since we've since moved the location to Rockport, I contacted Melissa to ask about her travel rates. She assured me that she wouldn't charge anything extraordinary, just enough to cover her own travel expenses. I think we still came out ahead here.
