This article is designed to be a resource you can use to both evaluate my work and compare photographers to pick one that is right for you.

Personality. Look for relaxed natural poses as an indication that the photographer establishes a non-aggressive, disarming rapport with the people being photographed.

ABOVE

Feliz and Keefe,

La Mansion

Skills / Technical. Trust your

eyes when looking at a photographer's work. Do the images hold your attention? Are they interesting?

Do you get a sense of what the day felt like?

Skills / Technical. Look for detail in white areas including the dress, cake and shirts as an indication that the photographer controlled the exposure. Look for soft, natural shadows as an indication that flash direction and quality are controlled.

ABOVE

Karina and Trevor,

Guenther House

Skills / Album Design.

Photographic skills don't lead directly to design skills. Great design works off of the images, making them more powerful together than they are alone.

ABOVE

Karisa and John,

Los Encinos

Look at images taken throughout several couples’ entire wedding. Did the photographer consistently capture  key images you are looking for along with communicating a sense of the style, atmosphere and emotion experienced?

ABOVE

Shayla & Jason

Southwest Craft Center

Choosing a photographer:

A guide to getting wedding photos

you’ll love.

By Steve Holloway

Three considerations you make when choosing a photographer can affect both your wedding photos and wedding day:

1) Personality

2) Skills

3) Ability

Personality is first because if your personalities don’t work together, no amount of skill and ability will compensate for this shortfall.

1) Personality. Is the photographer accommodating and able to work with you and your guests without intruding on or negatively affecting you and your guests’ wedding day experience?

Brides have told me stories about friends’ weddings they’ve attended where photographers would set up, shoot and reshoot multiple parts of the wedding in staged poses. After being asked to take a large group of the Bride’s entire family, one photographer told the Bride that he was through taking groups; when she insisted, he waited for everyone to assemble, took one shot and walked off. Some had abrasive directorial styles. Or would call out “shooting” and “again please” over and over like takes on a movie set. Another photographer actually stopped the couple during the first dance to set up a pose and facial expression.

On your wedding day:

I work unobtrusively to capture real moments as they happen. The only set ups I do are posing the formal groups and a few shots that I check framing and lighting before shooting action without staging. I’ve even had brides tell me they didn’t have a feel for what kind of shots we got because they couldn’t remember seeing me shoot. 

With few exceptions, I shoot constantly throughout your wedding day to capture every aspect I can in more than one way.

I make it a point to say yes. If you have photo ideas, we’ll shoot them. If you need to move the order of events around, it’s no problem. If something is physically or logistically impossible, I’ll offer alternative ideas to get the shot/effect.

2) Skills. Does the photographer have the technical skills to create extraordinary photographs and albums of your wedding?

The wedding is a unique discipline. Over the course of five to twelve hours, a photographer has to capture 200+ images that occur under varying lighting conditions with different time constraints while taking the sensibilities of the wedding party and quests into consideration. There are journalistic images of the pre-wedding preparations, ceremony and reception events; Formal groups; Interior architectural images of the church and reception venue; And table-top still lifes of the cakes, flowers, place settings and decorations.

Look at the photographer’s images. If the whites in dresses, shirts, table clothes and cakes are a flat panel of white without any detail, the exposure wasn't controlled. If there are harsh shadows that fall to the side or to the side and above the subject, the direction of the flash used wasn't controlled. If people look stiff or unnatural, there wasn't a non-aggressive, disarming rapport established with the people being photographed.

Trust your eyes.

Do the images hold your attention? Are they interesting? Do you get a sense of what the day felt like?

The experience advantage:

In addition to six years with a specialty in weddings, my background includes ten years as a commercial shooter with a specialty in people on location. Commercial location work involves solving multiple technical problems on the fly. Since I shoot for Medicare and Job Corps, I work with real people, not models, which present special directorial problems to produce images that look natural and real.

Both of these skills translate directly to the wedding discipline.

Look at the photographer’s

album designs.

Photographic skills don’t lead directly to design skills. Design is a discipline that requires an instinctive sense of balance to focus the eye on key elements while maintaining eye movement throughout the page and album by controlling how the elements work together.

Which images you choose and how you put them together keeps the album visually interesting.

If the first thing you notice is the design, the design failed. An overuse of ruled lines and odd shaped images wedged or overlaid for no apparent reason actually draws attention away from the images. Great design works off of the images, making them more powerful together than they are alone.

Does the photographer you’re looking at use templates from a lab or send images off to an album manufacturer and let them have a staffer who doesn’t know the photographer or the couple put the pages together?

The photographer/designer solution. My background also includes founding and, for seven years, managing a design firm that won Addy Awards for both advertising and magazine design.

My work focuses as much on imagery interaction and design as it does on individual images.

I think of wedding photography in terms of the finished album. Often overlooked or ignored, this is an obvious design principle that can make the difference between stunning and ho-hum.

I realize that album design starts with the very first image. The personalities of your families, the way you interact and the important parts of your wedding reveal themselves throughout your wedding day. Capturing images that allow that story to be told is the foundation of great design.

I design each album page from scratch applying techniques that let me use the best cropping for each photo while maintaining visual flow throughout the album to capture my impressions of your wedding day.

3) Ability. Does the photographer have the ability to consistently apply the skills they have image after image and wedding after wedding?

Look at images taken throughout one couples’ entire wedding. If possible, do this from two or three couples’ weddings from each photographer. Did the photographer consistently capture all of the key images you are looking for along with communicating a sense of the style, atmosphere and emotion experienced?

My experience handling commercial assignments also translates directly to producing consistent wedding results. Commercial shoots of people on location involve scheduling, location fees, talent scouts and booking, hair/makeup/stylist personnel, agency executives and creative directors, transportation, assistants and a hard deadline that must be met. Like a wedding, redoing a commercial shoot is a virtual impossibility.

Planning for every problem you think you might encounter is the only way to be ready for the problems you didn’t know about.

Because, even if you had the time to reshoot, the cost would be so prohibitive that you couldn’t.

This is the ability I bring to the wedding discipline, the ability to go into situations that can change unexpectedly and consistently solve technical problems and deliver imagery and albums that capture your wedding day experience.

To schedule a sample showing and see the difference the combination of photography and design makes, call 210.696.8024.