AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 27 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography. I am a full-time self-employed professional photographer and also offer wedding video services. I can comprehensively answer most questions regarding portrait and wedding photography. I've operated a custom color and black & white photo lab processing films and photographic prints. I now shoot digital exclusively and process in Photoshop CS3.
Experience I have over 27 years experience working as a portrait/wedding photographer.
Organizations Better Business Bureau.
Education/Credentials School of hard knocks. Self-study. Purchasing all books I can find about portrait and wedding photography and attending photography seminars over the years.
Question Hi John, I see you've been doing wedding photography for over 27 years. Just wondering if you can share some of your worse experiences and what you learned from them. I'm starting a photography business and it is hard to find "war stories". I want to be prepared as much as possible to handle bad situations the best way possible. Thanks.
Answer Hi Sherry,
I've not had many really bad situations. The first things which come to my mind are just a few little things. It is easier to start with the most recent in my memory.
This past year I've had two different grooms tell me they expected me to tell them jokes in order to make them smile in their photos. When I worked for MasterPortrait studios, I would kid around with children and act the fool to get smiles. But to have to tell jokes to make a man to get him to smile on his wedding day and when he knows the woman he is going to marry has showed up - nope. I expect him to be smiling very big without jokes that would simply make him laugh! This is similar to posing. When a bride tells me she wants 80% candid or journalistic style photography, it would be "posing" and fake if the reason he is laughing or smiling in the pics is because of someone telling him jokes instead of him being captured genuinely happy because he is about to marry the woman he loves. The other groom a few months earlier was standing in a large group right next to his new mother-in-law and when he was asked to smile for the picture, he said, and I quote, "I don't have any reason to smile". The look on his own mother's face and on the face of his mother-in-law were priceless. The bride looked like she was about ready to cry. Bottom line: I don't tell jokes to make a groom laugh when he should be smiling on his wedding day without any coaching. This is especially true when I've already seen the groom smiling very nicely for all the amateur photographers requesting pics.
I've had several other pro photographers tell me an experience they have also had like me is a bride or groom getting a bad attitude when they see the photographer hardly taking any pics the last two hours or so at the reception. While pro photographers may have been contracted for 8 hours or "unlimited" coverage time, what those brides and groom sometimes fail to remember is there is still a LIMITED number of shots ordered on the contract. So the photographer(s) have to stop shooting so they may still shoot more important things later like the garter and bouquet toss and bride and groom departure. I had a bride's father about a year ago who saw me sitting the last hour of the reception and he kept coming up to me telling me to shoot "something". It took his doing this a few times to make me realize the man was assuming he was entitled to unlimited shooting even though the contract said 400 at most. He even requested the same shot a few times. He hired me for only 5 hours and was to receive 400 images. (All the requested shots had all been shot already. All I had left was the bride & groom departure). Yet, there was that father of the bride assuming I'm suppose to keep on shooting no matter what! Sad. His attitude probably showed up in some of his own pics.
Then there are the bride and groom who are extremely happy to pose for the amateur photographers. Not long ago I shot a wedding where everything I set up was questioned by the bride and the bridemaids or they insisted on providing different versions of the same pose - but when they took snapshots of each other or other people - nobody was questioning what they were doing. So sad that a bride does this to herself so that she loses valuable time and a greater number of more professional quality images from her pro photographer.
One of the worse things which happens is during the first consultation a bride describing a very small wedding because she might be afraid if she admits to the much larger wedding she is actually having, she will have to pay the photographer a lot more money. So the photographer draws up a wedding day photography time-line for the smaller wedding. Needless to say, the time line for photography was insufficient (it takes time to move larger numbers of people around and to shoot them) and the bride may discover everyone feels rushed. I wonder why. But the photographer(s) are blamed. This situation is made much worse when bride and groom decide not to see each other before the Ceremony. So now there is even less time to photograph the bride and groom before they go to the reception. Some photographers have actually had customers lie to them so often that those photographers now charge twice what they would ordinarily charge for their lowest price package because of this. Those photographers just have to make sure they get compensated adequately.
VERY VERY OFTEN I see so-called wedding planners who plan the entire wedding day WITHOUT HAVING A CLUE WHAT KIND OF PHOTOGRAPHY COVERAGE THE BRIDE PAID FOR! Every photographer I know talks about this situation happening very often. Most CERTIFIED wedding planners have the experience and competence to know better. Most professional photographers provide at least 8 hours of coverage and hundreds of shots. Most all the group formals MUST be done BEFORE the Ceremony if the bride & groom want to be able to go the reception sooner and not leave guests waiting. When the bride & groom choose NOT to see each other before the Ceremony, this means that much more time has to be spent AFTER the Ceremony getting all the group shots with the bride & groom together. . .
THE BRIDE AND GROOM NOT SEEING EACH OTHER ON THE WEDDING DAY BEFORE THE CEREMONY IS A TRADITION WHICH DOES NOTHING FOR ENSURING THE BRIDE & GROOM RECEIVE MORE AND BETTER QUALITY PHOTOGRAPHY.
Cherry and I provide TWO consultations with our customers. Even during the first consultation we go over the concept of the photography time-line. It is so very frustrating when a customer just a few days before the wedding tells us they got a wedding planner who did NOT take the photography time-line into consideration when planning the entire wedding day. But we have the 2nd consultation usually about a month before the wedding so we can get all this ironed out. THERE ARE A FEW PHOTOGRAPHERS who couldn't care any less about the photography time-line. They just go with the flow the wedding planner sets up. Those photographers USE THE WEDDING PLANNER as the excuse for NOT doing more and better photography! The customers usually don't know better because they are not use to dealing with weddings. So the bride accepts responsibility for having less and not very good photographs because the wedding planner didn't give every one time for better pictures. Those photographers essentially just become SNAP SHOOTERS BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE ADEQUATE TIME TO SET UP PROFESSIONAL POSING AND THE BEST CAMERA AND FLASH SETTINGS TO CAPTURE TECHNICALLY PERFECT JPEGS. How sad. Cherry and I CARE VERY MUCH to deliver the best possible. So the larger the numbers of people in a wedding, the more the time the photography time line must have for proper photographic documentation. Recently, we did a photography time-line for both the bride and the wedding planner just a couple of days before the wedding. While we were setting up poses and shooting, the bride's father had to slightly interrupt us to ask when the groomsmen had to be ready for photos. Even after telling the bride and wedding planner - the dad and groomsmen were not told! Sometimes the wedding planner has a network relationship with a certain photographer. So if she plans a wedding with a different photographer, she may purposely sabotage the wedding day plans just enough so it makes better photography more difficult if not impossible - and the bride has no idea that it happened. The first clue the wedding planner is up to this is when the bride decides NOT to see the groom before the Ceremony but yet during our consultation with the bride she understood and agreed to the advantages of doing this! It is especially suspect when the bride and groom are already living together before their wedding - why then observe this tradition when the bride already KNEW AND UNDERSTOOD previously the importance of seeing each other before the Ceremony for MORE AND BETTER PHOTOGRAPHY?
A popular wedding venue is The Grandview atop Lookout Mountain. Take a look at the wedding photography displayed there at http://www.meetatgrandview.com Then look at the wedding photography we shot there in our Gallery 2 at http://www.weddingphotographics.net/gallery2.htm and in our Gallery 60 at http://www.weddingphotographics.net/gallery60.htm We try to provide images which are both TECHNICALLY PROFESSIONAL and artistically pleasing. This takes time when you are dealing with large numbers of people. The photos displayed on The Grandview website are poorly exposed, suffer color imbalance, bride's dress not fluffed, midtones washed out and highlights blown out. Professional wedding photography could really help out their website on selling their location to prospective brides - even if some of the photographs do not emphasize the location but just show great wedding photography shot there.
Then there is the WORK FLOW of professional wedding photographers. We shoot around 1,200 images of most weddings. We shoot 3 or 4 weddings in the most popular months. We CUSTOM PROCESS in photoshop and other photo editing software all the edited images. THIS TAKES TIME. On our wedding contract we guarantee to deliver all the images by a certain date. BUT, DESPITE THIS, we have about one out of five customers who contact us a few weeks before their images are due with all kinds of reasons we should STOP THE WORK FLOW ON OTHER WEDDINGS WE'VE SHOT AND JUST GIVE THEM ALL THE PROCESSING ATTENTION. The biggest reason it takes so long is not so much because we are spending so much time custom processing any given wedding, but the fact that as professional wedding photographers who shoot several weddings a month and sometimes a couple weddings the same weekend, we have a WORK FLOW of weddings which require time to work through. Every time a customer calls or emails us that they would like to see their photos (AHEAD OF THE SCHEDULE) they are using our time away from processing to have to explain all this to them - again. We always explain this during the consultation but this is sometimes forgotten.
The answer to your question is probably COMMUNICATION. We have the two consultations. We talk about the IMPORTANCE of the photography time-line in both consultations. We also have a lot of items listed on the contract to help make sure we are protected from customers who do not perform according to the photography time-line and which results in their not getting all the pics they might have requested. This is covered in the very first provision of our contract. If customers would cooperate and respect the photography time-line it can sometimes be ABSOLUTELY AMAZING ALL THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHS THEY WILL GET in contrast to running late, posing for amateur photographers, not telling all the family, friends and wedding party the photo time-line and more.
But I recommend DETAILED COMMUNICATION. I think I will also be including more discussion about using a CERTIFIED wedding planner and providing more written materials to re-inforce everything we discuss with our customers to help them to remember their part to make sure they have a great flowing wedding day.
