“I was thinking of getting a friend to shoot my wedding, she has a good camera and Photoshop Elements”
Will yourfriend shoot unbiasedly and without being distracted by friends and family? Will other guests be inclined to snap some photos of their own, resulting in photos with everyone looking in a different direction? What happens when you try to print an image at A4 or larger?
“I don’t see the point in spending $000′s on photos. We just want a couple of good ones. They are just photos.”
The cost of a wedding adds up, even on a budget. You have an absolute ball of a day and in the sheer excitement the day is over before you know it and life has returned to normal. The way you’ll re-live the special memories is through your wedding photos that captured all the moments of the day… the family photos that live on for generations, the beautiful photos of you and your new hubby/wifey looking stunning, and that funny shot of your mum falling in the garden after she had too much to drink! As a portion of the overall cost, the wedding photography is affordable and not worth taking chances on.
“$600 for a couple of hour’s photography, geez not a bad hourly rate”
All professional photographers take photos in RAW format, which in short means that every single image needs to have various settings applied in post production before it becomes a viewable jpeg image. By the time you add time for editing, meetings, slideshow production etc, two hours of wedding photography actually equates to at least 8 hours work. That’s before you add the cost of expensive cameras, attending seminars, buying samples of the latest end products and advertising. Additionally, you are paying for a professional photographer that is a creative artist and photo-retouching expert.
“I’ve seen some photographers offering high-res files, why don’t you guys have that in your packages?”
All our packages can be tailored as little or as much as you want and you can buy the final selection of high-res files, which will be edited, for a reasonable price. However you may be wasting your money. Read the next section to find out about this.
“Why do professional photographers make me buy prints through them?”
Ever noticed how an image looks different on your computer monitor compared to your laptop or TV? How many times have you had photos printed at a department store that come up looking like you’ve had a wild spray tan? There is a time-consuming process to go through for every single print that is produced. This process starts with colour calibrated monitors, using the best printers, upsizing in a particular way, and re-editing images and settings to suit the particular printer profile. All this has to be done for each image at each different size, on each different medium for each different print lab.
This is why a disc of high-res files is probably not much good to you if you want prints on the wall that get commented on every time a friend comes round, or makes you feel a bit happier when your partner puts your hand wash only garment in the washing machine! There’s also the security of knowing we have three backups of every single raw file and final edited jpeg image, and these backups are kept in separate locations for extra safe-keeping.