What you need to know to make an educated guess: am I hiring a real professional?
Judging Professionalism
What makes a wedding photographer professional?
One of the problems of hiring a wedding photographer is that you have to guess their level of professionalism in a short period of time (and a small number of interactions). So here is a collection of red flags and a list of standard practices, specific to the wedding industry.
Standard: Managing Clients
This doesn’t sound very sexy, but it’s an integral part of being a business owner and running a healthy business. I’ve seen a few talented and smart people start in this industry only to see them fizzle out, or worse yet crash and burn, due to poor business operations. When I talk about managing clients, it’s involves:
- Communication – Being able to communicate effectively over phone, email, text. This sounds obvious, but just wait until a wedding videographer that’s 3 months late on the delivery starts ghosting you.
- Underpromising, Overdelivering – Wedding vendors are notorious for overpromising, usually with late deliveries on the final product (especially for videography).
- Respecting Time – Not being late, working with our couples (as if their time is valuable).
- Being Honest – Again, another no brainer, but I’ve seen so many white lies and blatant lies in this industry.
Standard: Capturing Images
It still blows me away when I see a wedding photographer that can’t capture images with consistency or reliability. This involves many dimensions, such as:
- Not Knowing Equipment – Our cameras are our tools. I’ve heard of photographers not having equipment set up correctly, not having the right equipment, not preparing equipment correctly, etc.
- Not Knowing Settings – Our cameras are tools, and camera settings determine how we wield them. Having the wrong settings leads to missed images and unusable images, followed by substandard images.
- Not Knowing Locations – Locations have pros and cons, and limitations that we have to work within. Our job is knowing and predicting these variables.
Now this may seem like stuff that a bride and groom should not have to worry about, which is true if their photographer is a professional. But it’s important to have an eye for this, since it might help you reverse a bad decision before your wedding day.
Storytime – Engagement Photos in Downtown, at Night
Our couple met with us after they had booked their wedding photographer and did their engagement session. But during the engagement session they saw something concerning. The photographer gladly agreed to shoot at the DWP building in DTLA, doing night photos with the LA skyline. The first half of the session in the daylight at a university went well, but during the night photos our couple could see the photographer struggling with getting images. Apparently they had little to no experience with shooting in low light, resulting in only 3-4 usable images after an hour of shooting (overpromised and underdelivered).
Our couple saw that lack of professionalism:
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- The photographer didn’t know how to use their equipment in low light
- They didn’t know the right settings to get good images
- They didn’t understand the location’s limitations, especially for lighting.
So they weighed out the risk of losing their deposit and hired us to redo their engagement session and cover their wedding too. We had no problem doing their engagement photography in low-light night situations. Luckily, the other wedding photographer refunded the deposit after that debacle, though there was legal obligation to do so.
One other aspect of capturing images is that it’s ideal if we can do so candidly and seamlessly. When we photograph a couple, it can really awkward. We break that up by talking, joking, laughing, and making it less work and more play (that’s really important for photo-phobic couples). Not knowing those three rules above means that we have to break that flow to do the mechanical part of our job, while letting the personal and directing part of our job fail. So a photographer that is a pro at capturing images can focus on the part of the shoot that is not professional: our amateur model couples.
Standard: Protecting Images and Footage
As an engineering degree, one thing that was pounded into our core was removing single points of failure. For example: when you design the life-support system for astronauts, you need a redundancy in case it fails. Well, when the primary system fails, the redundancy is now the primary, so what is the new redundancy? We are forced to think of these nightmare situations to make sure people don’t die. Well, with weddings our job is to make sure we don’t lose the images that we can never get back if lost. And I’m still blown away at how many “professionals” screw this up. So here are basic practices for protecting images that professionals do:
- Create redundant copies of files in camera (possible with photos, not practical for wedding videography)
- Protect those images until they are dumped onto a computer
- Maintain redundancies until the final product is delivered
- (Optional) Store data in case of client error
So point by point, this is why each step is important for professionals to do.
(1) High end cameras have the ability to write photos to 2 cards at the same time. This is a no-brainer extra step that protects us from card failures. I like to write RAWs to my main card and JPGs to the backup. In 13 years of photography, I’ve had 4 card failures, all of which I had redundancies and was able to recover the images with recovery software.
(2) Protecting those images before they reach your computer is something most photographers surprisingly don’t give much thought.
Horror Story – Memory Card Wallet
Once when I was doing video of a wedding, I stumbled on a memory card wallet during the cocktail hour. The card wallet held all of the memory cards from the first half of the day (preparation, wedding ceremony, and family photos). I approached the photographer with it and she freaked out, not even knowing that she had lost it in the first place. This wedding was at Casa del Mar and the wedding photographer was charging $5k-$6k for weddings back in 2005 (high-end).
Horror Story – Putting the “Ass” back in Assistant
I know a videographer that had his second shooter swap memory cards in the middle of the day. He unprofessionally put the memory card (likely a small SD card) into his front pocket. At the end of the day, the card was gone and likely fell out when pulling out his phone. They searched the whole venue that night and found nothing. The card contained the whole other angle of the wedding ceremony, so that videographer has to do an edit without half of the footage.
Potential Horror Story – Just Getting Dinner
After a long day shooting a wedding, we stopped at a popular Asian diner to get a late dinner with another wedding photographer, also tired from a long day shooting. When we sat down, I asked him, “Where are your memory cards?” to which he replied, “In my cameras…” I prodded, “Where are your cameras?” and he said, “In my car….” I told him that if someone steals or breaks into his car, they will get $30,000 in equipment (doesn’t really matter because the equipment is insured) and a bunch of priceless photos of some stranger’s wedding. Note that the whole time I’m asking this we have our cameras right on us hanging off our hips. Backup cards were separated and in the car in case we get mugged or something. To this day we have never lost a single photo, because we try to think of these things beforehand. And this stuff does happen, like with this one in Michigan (2018) and this one in SF (2017) and this one in Oregon (2016) and this one in Indiana (2015).
So to make things short, a professional looks out for those nightmare scenarios. Part of our job is worrying about these things so that our customers never have to.
(3) Again, this is an IT no-brainer. There are several standards, but the standard is a 321 policy. 3 copies of the footage on 2 different storage mediums, with 1 offsite storage. If my main hard drive fails or my house burns down, I won’t lose any of my current projects. The last time I did a destination wedding, I had 4 copies of the footage on separate mediums, on two persons, and in 2 different luggages (one carry-on and one checked). I refuse to be this guy who had his gear bag stolen. I also refuse to be this photographer who had his house burnt down, since it’s our due diligence to protect the images (even when we lose our home). And the crazy thing is that I see this a lot, but they haven’t had the misfortune of making the news yet.
(4) Storing photos in cloud storage is sometimes advertised as a package option, but we do as a courtesy to our couples (who sometimes don’t understand backing things up and protecting your memories). We once did a wedding for billionaire (on the Forbes 400). They have virtually unlimited money for computers and cloud storage and even hiring their own IT guy. But 3 years later they called us asking if we had their wedding photos, since they lost it when moving. So hold wedding photos in JPG format indefinitely as another layer of protection, even after the delivery.
Standard: Presence at a Wedding
One aspect of being a wedding photographer is our appearance and interactions during a wedding, where professionalism matters in front of your loved ones and in front of the other vendors we work with.
Behavior – How we act
Let me be candid. Our job is the type of job where we are always pleasant, no matter what. It doesn’t matter if we got 2 hours of sleep because of our colic baby (yep, thanks Hayden) or if it was because our daughter dislocated her elbow 30 minutes before we had to leave for a wedding (yep, thanks Remy). We always show up to a wedding on time, ready to go, with smiles. So it makes me cringe when I hear something like this:
Horror Story: Love Quarrels
We are shooting a wedding at a golf course and I’m chatting it up with the venue coordinator. He tells me how nice it is working with us and how Judy and I work so well together. So I probe a little on that comment, and he tells me about this husband-wife team. They would apparently argue in front of the couple, like the sarcastic kind of fight that’s light on yelling but heavy on the bitterness. He said it was super awkward for him and for the wedding couple. For the record, Judy and I have never and will never have an argument on a wedding day … we save it for the drive home 🙂
Now there is a balance of service versus performance (some artists are super serious but make great work), but it’s up to you to decide what you want to hang out with on your wedding day. And even then, there are standards that you just don’t break. Like arguments. With your wife. On a wedding day. In front of the newlyweds. It could be worse; they could be hungover:
Horror Story: Red-eye Special
Our bride had to hire a new videographer the week before her wedding, due to another wedding nightmare of losing her videographer the week before her wedding (2 weddings in one day). So the only thing we know about this new videographer is the bride telling us he’s a celebrity wedding videographer and has down a lot of high-end weddings (part of his sales speech). The day of the wedding, I chat it up with him and I notice he has red eyes. He starts complaining about drinking and partying too much that Friday night, and how he only got 3 hours of sleep. The funny thing is I only had 2 hours of sleep (not from partying or drinking, of course), but I didn’t say anything about it and more importantly didn’t show it the day of the wedding. As a videographer myself, I could see the substandard job he did that day. There was no enthusiasm, and he spent was too much time on his phone (keep in mind this was in 2010, so that was more obvious than now). He topped it off by drinking during the wedding reception and hitting on the bridesmaids.
Appearance – How we look
I’ve had beach weddings that I get to wear sandals. I’ve had black tie events where I’m only allowed to wear black. But there are standards to our appearance at a wedding. We also have to balance performance versus appearance. We’ve seen photographers wear short skirts (and thus can’t even crouch for photos). I’ve seen some show more cleavage than skill (like seriously, I asked the bride about the photographer and she said, “She’s so pretty, isn’t she?”). The very first wedding Judy assisted me on (of which started her now career) she wanted to wear heels. I told her HELL NO and had her wear her work shoes (working at a hospital). But what you are watching out for is this:
Horror Story: Khaki Shorts
Videography company is a group of friends that work together on weekends. They show up with a crew of 4. Number 4 is wearing tan, khaki shorts … to a wedding. He also decides to get a shot from behind the bride during the wedding ceremony, ruining both angles of our photos, along with all of the video angles from the front too. Luckily we can photoshop khaki shorts out of a few photos.
The Production Effect – How we work
There are two ends to this spectrum. There is a the production side and the candid, fly-on-the-wall side. The production side is like paparazzi, with a whole crew working around the couple. This is the appearance of the team, since the large production doesn’t necessarily mean better photos/video. The flip side is the candid approach, but this can come at the sacrifice of getting better or needed footage. Most photographers are a mix of the two. It’s important to ask which one they are more like and that it lines up with your preferences. I’ve seen weddings where there are too many people doing too much, and others where the photographer was not doing enough to get the bare essentials of capturing a wedding.
Standard: Delivering the Product
Most of what we do is deliver a product, and the delivery of such is a measure of their professionalism. There are several dimensions to this, including time (haha get it, it’s a dimension), responsiveness, and the actual product delivered.
Delivering on Time – The plague of the wedding industry
Now I say this because the most common and most complained about issue with wedding photo and video is how long it takes to get your cherished images and video. Video is particularly notorious for this. I’ll hear time and time again that a couple who got married half a year ago sadly has no or barely any photos to show for it. In most media industries, our delivery timeline is strict and heavily monitored. A commercial client has deadlines for their marketing campaign, so they will more than let you know if you aren’t holding up your end as the photographer. But in the wedding industry, brides are more polite than that (which we like) and the vendors take advantage of this (which we DON’T like).
This is the most common problem we’ve seen with photo/video vendors. Our solution is make sure you get a written deadline, and a knowledge of your course of action if that fails (written demands, small claims, etc.).