Wedding photographer sued this week.

Well there’s been great interest this week in yesterdays news item about the wedding photographer who has been sued for delivering substandard photographs. As you will know from many of my previous blog posts it is these type of ‘photographers’ who create all the wedding photography horror stories and why it is so important you check out and book a good fulltime professional as opposed to a Saturday guy, or Weekend Warrior as we call them in the business. Now, I don’t know all the details as to how this particular couple ended up booking this photographer but I had a look at the photographers website (which incidentally I note is no longer online at the time I write this) and to be quite frank his images were dire all round!

Now all photographers will have some kind of portfolio to show to potential clients. This may be their website, wedding albums, brochure, etc. So it is very important that you give it a good look. And before booking anyone make sure you see plenty of wedding albums and study carefully the images. All the albums should be of complete genuine weddings, beware of the ones that are compilations from a number of different weddings. The standard of photography you see in the sample albums will be what you can expect from your own wedding day. It is highly unlikely a wedding photographer who’s albums are full of mediocre pictures is suddenly going to produce a set of stunning photographs at your wedding.

Another good tip is ask to see their most recent weddings. Most wedding photographers these days will provide the brides and grooms with their own online gallery. If a photographer is reluctant to let you see these then alarm bells should be ringing! All good photographers are immensely proud of their work and will be more than happy to show you as many photographs and albums as you wish. You’ll have noticed from my blog how most of what I talk about is weddings and wedding photography. That is because I love them! I love photographing them and I love spending the days afterward designing and creating the albums and books. These are a photographers selling tools, so make sure you pay more attention to them than to his sales patter.

We are coming into the wedding fair season and as photography is one of the key elements of the wedding day you’ll find at these shows photographers are a plenty. At the last big wedding show I exhibited at there were almost twenty Edinburgh wedding photographers. It is estimated that between 60-70% of wedding photographers are part-timers rather than bona fide full time professionals so if you are going to be attending any wedding shows please be careful. The couple in the above news item found their guy at a wedding fair!

Anyway, I hope some of what I’ve said may be of help. I had intended my next blog entry to be about my recent magazine work but decided to do a quick on this subject while its still fresh in everyone’s mind. I’ve posted a few images too from Louise and Alan's recent wedding at Craighouse in Edinburgh. If you want to see some more there’s three extensive wedding galleries on my website and I’ll be at the Queensferry Hotel open evening on October 21st.