How to Choose the Right Photographer for your Wedding Day. (Series Post) - Part 1

This is a series blog post where I'll be discussing the important factors of selecting the right photographer for your wedding day.

How do I know the differences of a good photographer 
and bad photographer?

Quality

As for the quality side, there is no plain or simple answer because what is good or bad to myself is not the same good or bad to you. You'd have to know what you like in imagery that is perfect for you on your wedding day. You may need to look at tons of wedding photos from local to world-wide photographers to find out what style do you like in photography. Not every photographer shoots in a certain type of style, some shoot in a unique style some shoot a type like photojournalistic wedding photos to traditional portraiture. Some can shoot all types, or certain types, or even some would prefer just 1 type like photojournalistic wedding photographers.

The types of wedding photography are 

1. Photojournalistic/Photojournalism/Candid
2. Traditional Portraiture, very posed "classic" feel to the portraits and has older style lighting techniques.
3. Modern Portraiture, where it may "look" candid but is setup to look real and has modern lighting techniques.

(Yes, I understand most of you reading this will not know the differences of classic older style lighting techniques vs. modern lighting techniques. Please refer to a modern day magazine to see the lighting in the images which would be considered modern.)

Samples

Photojournalistic/Photojournalism/Candid

Traditional Portraiture (with some modern lighting techniques)

                  

 

Modern

Traditional (somewhat)

The above types can be mixed with some photographers providing that, some do specialize in these types though, so keep this in mind when researching your photographer for your wedding. The photographer may or may not have this information on their website. I will post samples at a later time in this post.

Personality

As for the business and personal relationship side of a photographer is also no plain or simple answer. Some people prefer working with casual fun photographer, but some prefer working with a photographer that is very professional meaning emotionless strictly business, so this depends on who you are as a person and who you know will fit best for the photography coverage of your wedding. But this may or may not be as important as the quality. Let's say if you see a photographer that has everything but personality that you'd prefer, the #1 most important factor is the images because you, your family, children, and children's children will see the images, not the person who helped make the images (the photographer). This may or may not cause the images to be less interesting, but if I had a choice of a less quality photographer that did have a perfect personality vs. a photographer that had much more powerful quality but less than perfect personality, I would choose the quality over everything else.

Check out Part 2 of the series!