lissener, you’re 100% wrong. Not 80/20, one hundred percent, flat out wrong.
They met beforehand and Indygrrl told her she wanted mostly candid shots – and lots of them. There shouldn’t have to be a reason on Og’s green earth that she should have to specify, “and whatever you do, please make sure that at least some of those pictures actually include my own mother, the rest of my family and all my other guests.”
That’s absurd!
The woman spent more of her time eating and socializing and acting like a freaking guest, than someone who was being paid to provide a professional service. That is completely unacceptable under any condition, regardless of whether or not she was givin a specific list of people to photograph or not. Clearly, if she’d’ve spent her time moving around the crowd and getting lots and lots of candid shots, the odds are that there’d be more than one obscured photo of the mother of the bride anyway!
She is a professional wedding photographer, and as you’ve been told repeatedly in this thread, there are certain just plain givens in that industry, regardless of style. Get pictures of the bride, the groom, their families and all the guests. It’s not fucking rocket science!
Indygrrl, best wishes on your marriage! You were a beautiful bride, and at least it’s clear that you were utterly joyous that day. You’ll cherish those memories even without some of the missing photos.
I’m trying to decide if there’s any point to posting my opinion about who dropped the ball here. I don’t want to blame Indygrrl and make her feel worse, either, but I have to agree with lissener’s 80/20 - if it’s important to you, DO babysit the professional.
To take your analogy further, Shirley, this would be like expecting the barber to cut both sides of your head (a reasonable expectation), but walking out with only one side cut and complaining about it later because you didn’t keep an eye on the barber and make sure he cut both sides of your hair. Yes, a professional should absolutely meet your reasonable expectations; if you have any experience with how the world actually works, though, you’ll keep an eye on things any way.
I’d like to jump on the 80/20 bandwagon also.
We met with our wedding photographer before hand and not only checked out his work (he showed us different wedding albums he’d done in different styles), but layed out who would be attending and who we wanted shots of.
Even with this in hand I still observed him when he first arrived to make sure he was proceeding as expected.
Once I saw him introduce himself to several guests and start directing people for various shots I was finally comfortable with him continuing without my supervision.
If something is that important to you, you can’t really place faith in them that it’s going to go right even if they are supposed professionals. You still need to inspect what you expect.
I do wonder if it is a social/etiquette difference we are seing here. But in my experience the Bride’s mother is often the second most important person at a wedding (the Bridegroom comes some where below the Bride and her Mother in this reguard ) Maybe in some places the Bride’s mother isn’t considered an especially important guest and so it would make sense to tell the photographer to take her picture as well.
I wonder if the photographer didn’t expect to be the main photographer at the wedding. She obviously isn’t a wedding specialist and maybe thought she was being asked only to take some nice Husband and Wife pictures. She may have then been unready to act as the main photographer.
Seriously, let your friend see the photos, but not in an accusatory way. Maybe ask her to help you chose the best ones for an album. If I had hired a professional to do photography for a friends wedding I would like to see the end product was up to standard. If the photographer had billed herself as a professional wedding photographer then she would have every right to be angry with the photographer. If she was just a skilled friend, then your friend might think twice before hiring her to do more weddings.
Well, featherlou, there’s no such thing as a perfect analogy. Obviously my analogy falls apart if you take it any further, because the situations are not analogous, mainly because in the barber’s chair you can keep an eye on what the barber is doing, and you can see the results before you pay the money. That is obviously different from a wedding photographer, when you have other things to do besides look over the photographer’s shoulder, and you don’t see the results until many days later, and by then there is no possible way to fix it.
I agree with the notion that you should make sure the professionals working for you do a good job up to a point, but then I also think there is a minimum level of service you should be able to expect without babysitting them. And a picture of mom falls under that minimum level of service.
My point in asking if she has a website is, it should mention her prices and have a good indication of her style. Was/is her website misleading? How much does she charge for a wedding?
I would say that it’s 100% the photographer’s fault (she should have made sure she knew what her customer wanted). But as I said before, knowing it’s the photographer’s fault isn’t really going to make you feel any better when you’ve got crappy pictures of a one-time event (as Indygrrl unfortuantely knows). That’s why I always advise people to make the list of shots they want…it’s better to just cover yourself now, than to be sorry later. You SHOULD be able to count on a professional, but some things are too important to leave to assumptions.
If it makes Indy feel any better, my grandparents’ wedding photos were all ruined in the darkroom. This was back in the day when photographers all had their own darkrooms. The photographer felt horrible and retook pictures of them in their fancy clothes. Now whenever we see pictures of them in their wedding clothes, we get to recount the story of how the originals were ruined and the ‘wedding’ pictures were taken after the honeymoon.
If you want to create a fun memory to take away some of the dissappointment, you could take other pictures of your friends and families, cut them out either digitally or manually, and ‘recreate’ your wedding pictures using the backgrounds from the professional shots. Mom in a bikini in Hawaii standing in the background of a picture of you and you Dad dancing. A picture of your parents at their wedding superimposed onto your shot of you and your husband. If you wait long enough, you can add children who weren’t even born at the time of the wedding. Everyone would know it was faked, but you could look at it and be “ha ha, that wedding photographer couldn’t photograph her way out of a paper sack” instead of just looking at what you got and fuming.
They are, in fact all the lighthouses in North Carolina, including the currently active Coast Guard Station Lighthouse (the ugly skinny one second from the end) and the nearly unknown Price Island light house, the oldest. (Unrestored, and nearly inaccessable.)
To the person asking about the website, it looks like a professional photographer’s website to me. I’m no expert, obviously, but on the raving reviews of my friend and by the looks of the website I thought she’d be a good photographer. I know my friend must have gotten a discount because she charges about $3000 for weddings (and that’s almost as much as my entire wedding cost).
Sigh, I really appreciate everyone’s supportive comments about this whole debacle. I do have some wonderful photos even though they weren’t what I was expecting and I’m just going to make my album and photo collages out of those. In the future, if I ever need to hire a photographer for anything again I will know better than to let someone else handle it.
I’m still going to have to say that if a photographer can’t figure out on her own that she needs to take more than one picture of the bride’s mother should change professions.
) Maybe in some places the Bride’s mother isn’t considered an especially important guest and so it would make sense to tell the photographer to take her picture as well.