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A FEW PERSONAL NOTES ON CHOOSING YOUR PERFECT WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER! (MoscaPhoto's Perspective)

Dear Brides and Grooms,

What I am about to write, is a summary - albeit detailed, with links to examples supporting our claims, in light blue - of the ways Josh and I intend meetings with our couples to go. This first encounter always is an email requesting the availability of the couple's wedding date, followed by, perhaps, a few informative facts about the wedding itself, like locations of the ceremony and reception.

What comes next, after my initial direct response to the questions, is a person to person, face to face meeting. During this meeting, which always seems to last a good 45 minutes to one hour, we get to introduce ourselves as physical, approachable, human beings :-) The initial email versus the meeting, always has a different "feel" to it... suddenly, we are not an impersonal typed up aggregate of letters; we are a young, experienced, charismatic and friendly couple, in love with the art of wedding photography and eager to discuss wedding details!

It is SO important to be able to listen to the couple, and to offer advice, and to explain our view, and to understand their needs, and to reassure them of our talents, and to demonstrate and support our claims with hard evidence (our printed portfolio) and personality (us). The very first meeting is essentially between complete strangers. A sort of blind date, if you will. First impressions and openness and communication always allow for a great meeting, with great working relationship potential, and in most cases, brand new friendships, as well! Ask most of our couples of 2009, for example... we enjoy a night on the town and dinner and drinks often, and LOVE it!

When a couple meets with us, chances are, it will have been their first time looking for a wedding photographer. Josh and I know and understand this completely. Our attitude is one of relaxed confidence. We start off by wanting to find out a bit more about each of them, which propagates to them asking questions about us! Questions that are, in our opinion, completely relevant and important in relation to personality and lifestyle.

There is no possible way Josh and I can perfectly match up with another couple's interests or beliefs to the T; we are aware of this. However, once some commonality is reached, we will have bonded and will have found issues and ideals to have great conversations about! Life and experience comparisons spawn from there, followed, usually, by amazing coincidences, such as friends or experiences we have in common, or share common interests about. We LOVE meeting new people and learning all about them, who they are, what they do, what their dreams are, what their favorite day to day things may be... we are open about our lives to others; it is welcome and inspiring for others to connect with us and get to know who we really are, besides two wedding photographers.

We strive to remain in a couple's life, after their wedding, as their own personal "lifetime photographers"! We always want to feel a connection with them and everyone in the family. Should we live that long, we would love to photograph our couples' children's weddings down the road... :-) Seriously!

The last half hour or so or our meeting is spent talking about the couples' wedding plans, while our albums and prints are shuffled from hand to hand, from pile to pile. Our printed portfolio is meant to be a fun collection of select weddings that couples can, literally, handle without any worry! It should be fun and relaxing to look through books and piles of 4x6 prints. A couple should enjoy what they see, and should want to go through everything without needing to worry about tears or finger smudges! After all, the couple's own album and prints will most certainly be eventually handled - certainly not gently - by the babies in the family, or innocently knocked off of the coffee table by their clumsy doggie :-) What a test of time it is to see our printed material as pristine as it is, even after a hundred brides and grooms and mothers and best friends have played with it all! :-)

In short, Josh and I love what we do. We could not imagine being more blessed than we already are with the life we lead. We get to exercise our creativity, and find inspiration in details we come across for the first time, the day of a shoot. It is hard work and it carries a level of responsibility unlike most lines of work. There is nothing that can be re-shot from a wedding day, we are aware of this and stake our lives and careers and future on it that we will perform and produce everything we promise, and more, with every wedding, or engagement, or portrait we face.

Our advice to you, newly engaged couples looking for the perfect wedding photographer, is this:

take time to look through the online portfolio. Blogs are a wonderful way for a photographer to post current projects, they are more of a one-on-one way of sharing images with the public. What else are they involved with, when they are not photographing w...? Look at the fancy flash web sites, but don't forget to roam through their blog too.
check to see if they are on Facebook and Twitter, see what they post on a day to day basis, how they interact with the public, what they share with the world and how others react to their work
regardless of cost (provided you have an open mind about considering to expand your wedding photography budget) meet with a few, in person.See what it means to bond with your photographers; see what a difference a great professional wedding album is, versus a consumer one; see how you feel when you look through hundreds of 4x6s of a complete stranger's wedding... do you feel a connection? some inspiration? do you laugh when you see subjects laughing, in other words, do you feel what the image is trying to portray?
how do the photographers strike you as? are they friendly, confident, fun, relaxed, open, willing, able? Would you go grab a martini and a bite to eat with them, and talk about what an awesome camping trip you just returned from? In other words, do you feel as if your photographers are not only talented and organized, but do you feel as if they would understand YOU as you are? You, the couple, need to be portraid IN your wedding photography. The photographers are there to capture your personalities and your individuality, via their equipment and artsy eye and post production, however, as an objective journalist, the photographers have to know how to do what they do; do it well; do it for you.

There are many people with cameras who offer photography as a side job, for a quick extra weekend buck, especially here in the Portland area. Only a handful are veterans with a quick eye and an organized sense of "weddingness". Some things need to be left to the professionals. Professionals who will be there for you even after the wedding is over. There is much more to wedding photography than simply showing up. Lots of painstaking hours of post production and online posting and request responding and album designing and customer service in general. This is why most professionals are full-time photographers. In our case, there is NO TIME for much else, especially during the prime months of wedding shooting season (which for our area, the Pacific NW, is the 4 months of summer).

Search for your wedding photographer early! Book your venue on the date you desire, then look for a photographer. We are the vendors who book first, before anyone else is booked. We are the ones who will create memories that will not be eaten in an hour, memories that will not be consumed by moths, memories that will not wilt after a day... Photographs are for ever, as well your memories should be.

Thank you for reading my blurb and I hope to have been of some help! Contact us about your wedding day and if it so happens that we are already booked for your date, we have a handful of trusted and wonderful photographers with a similar style to ours, who we would be more than happy to refer you to!

Have a wonderful day and Happy Planning!

~ Alice & Josh

Email: Alice@MoscaPhoto.com

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Disclaimer: I am not in any way claiming that the above said is how all photographers feel and operate. This essay is not intended to be a guide for my colleagues to follow. It is simply our own method of establishing a connection and a relationship with those couples whom we bond with. I am curious to read your (couples' and colleagues') reactions... Thank you! :-)