“Pretty Good with a Camera”, or Should I Hire a Friend to Shoot my Wedding?

Ahh, the age old question.  We’re on a budget, paying for the wedding ourselves, and we have this friend who has this really high end dslr and is pretty good with it.  Her pictures always look so good and I think she’d do a great job photographing my wedding.  Should I ask my friend/family member to shoot my wedding?

Art:

The answer isn’t an easy one.  It really depends on what you value.   If you’ve always enjoyed and appreciated art and stylish things then you really have to ask yourself if you’ll be happy with “snapshots” from your wedding.

Hiring a professional is so much more than having someone simply document your day in photography.  You’re commissioning an artist to interpret all the beauty, magic and intensity of your day through their eyes and vision.  It’s what they love to do.

A good wedding photographer will step out of him/herself and express your story with visual artistry.  Not exactly the same thing as being caught on someone’s iPhone.

Time:

Another question to consider is simply, how busy are you? If you’re a student or working or BOTH, than a friend or relative probably isn’t going to craft a beautiful album or other wonderful keepsakes for you and your fiancee to enjoy years down the line.

Maybe you love scrapbooking but if it’s not in your repertoire seriously ask yourself, who’s going to make a wedding album for me? And will it be a plastic sleeved, vinyl thing with 4×6′s from Walmart?  Personally, I think that’s the saddest way for your wedding day to be remembered.

All that emotion and energy and personal style invested in telling and celebrating your love story only to end up in something that doesn’t really reflect and represent who You are?  Boo.

Nostalgia:

I also have to give a little plug here for bridal sessions.  Not really my cup of tea when I got married.  Thought they were indulgent and  for a kind of girl I didn’t consider myself to be.  But think about it…  The hunt for that perfect dress, by the perfect designer.  The right hair, the right understated make up.  You look Gorgeous and you feel buoyed by the way He’s looking at you…

Capture this.  Please capture this.

I’m a mom of two beautiful little boys, but I never had a bridal session done and it would be such a wonderful thing now to share with my sons.  This is the perfect realm of a professional, especially one who has an eye for portraiture or fashion photography.   It’s their job to employ the 3 biggies of artistic photography, Posing, Lighting, Make up, and turn them into a sort of visual poem about the beginning of your lives together.  Romantic.

If you’d like to read more, check out this amazing comparison of a skilled amateur and a professional shooting a wedding side by side.  A picture’s worth a thousand words…

More photos available at my Salt Lake Wedding Photography website.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 11:58 am and is filed under Weddings and tagged with diy wedding photography, Tips, utah wedding photography, Wedding Photography Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.