How to Choose a Toronto Wedding Photographer by Price?
We all love a good deal. The feeling you get from saving money when getting a high-quality product is almost as good as the feeling you get when the love of your life asks you to marry him. The two of these rarely go hand in hand, however. Everything that is related to the wedding industry has quite a price tag. The purpose of these things is to make your Big Day unique and unforgettable, as well as bring forth your style as a couple, and, of course, just like anything else that fits this description, it is precious and therefore has its price.
While you might be on a mission to find the best wedding deals in Toronto, let me explain to you why saving on a wedding photographer and videographer is not the best idea. When you hire a wedding photographer, you expect to receive a service and a product. While both the product and the service appear to be pretty straightforward, they are complex when it comes to what you’re paying for. So what is it that brings that price tag so high when it comes to wedding photography and videography?
Service:
Labour
That is the starting point. You are paying a team to capture your wedding day on photo and video.
Time
Time is money, especially in the high-paced Toronto. You are paying your team to do their job for a specific amount of hours.
Equipment
If you ever saw a price tag on a good camera, you understand why this is important. Also, remember that there are also lenses, tripods, sliders, stabilizers, lights, flashes, reflectors, memory cards, and so on. These cost quite a bit. There ’s always something you can get that would improve your work, so no, it’s not a one-time investment.
Skills
I assume you would choose a talented photographer, whose personal style appealed to you. But before a photographer could even develop that style, he had to learn how to use all of his equipment to its maximum potential. Just like with the equipment, there’s always room to grow.
Insurance
A wedding photographer’s life depends on his gear. However, it is often put at risk when it is shared amongst the team members, or even when it is exposed to big crowds of people, that, let ’s just put it simply, aren’t always sober.
Transportation
Tara Weddings shoots all over the GTA, and sometimes even further. That means that we spend at least an hour or two driving. That’s time, money, insurance, and other vehicle costs.
HR
Each year we get more and more bookings. That requires finding more and more professionals that suit our team standards.
Product:
Labour
One of the key components to good wedding photography and videography is excellent post production aka photo and video editing.
Time
For each hour at the wedding, a wedding photographer will spend another hour finishing the material until every last picture looks great.
Equipment/ software
In order to professionally backup, retouch, edit, colour-correct and finish both the photo and video materials, we would need storage (hard drives and clouds), a powerful computer, a drawing tablet and nearly five different kinds of software.
Insurance
All of the above needs to be insured.
Skills
Last but not least, skills in post production are just as important as the skills that are required to capture the material. It makes all the difference between pictures that look good, pictures that look amazing, and pictures that make you cry tears of joy because you can really feel your Big Day all over again.
As you can see, it’s not just about pressing a button. All these aspects are equally important. So the next time you see cheap wedding photography in Toronto, ask yourself what is the photographer compromising, and then ask yourself if that’s also something you would like to compromise. When all is said and done, remember, that your wedding day will be over quickly, and it’s the photography that will be taking you back.
How do you choose a wedding photographer? If you are a bride or groom and you’re looking for coverage for your wedding day, you have lots of options.
You just go to Google or any other free advertisement listing you know and start looking for wedding photographers.
I’m going to speak about my experience and my city. I work in Toronto mostly so I’m going to show you how to choose a wedding photographer in Toronto, but you can apply it to your area.
In the wedding industry there are several types of wedding photography services. There are such services provided by people who are not wedding photographers.
They’re just photographers who are starting out and want to try themselves in the wedding industry. They will not charge much, so if you don’t have a budget or if you don’t really care about wedding photography or any coverage for your wedding you can consider these guys. They can be good, they can be not good. The thing is if you see their portfolio, this portfolio will most likely consist of a very small selection from a potentially inconsistent body of work. So to be safe I would rather say no thanks to these guys and move on to other options.
Another type of wedding photographer are those who have been doing photography for some years and they have some wedding experience. These are a good option, much better than the first option, ones that are just starting. Everything about their presentation may be nice and it may seem that you can get good pictures for any budget level, but the thing is your wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so if anything goes wrong on the wedding day you might regret your choice. There are sometimes uncontrollable circumstances that may cause problems to your photography, like bad weather, bad lighting during the day like a moody or overwhelming hard light. You might end up having all these super dark shadows underneath your eyes. You may be late, not leaving enough time for the pictures. Your venue may be dimly lit. Your venue lighting may have a bit of light flicker that will affect video. In these special situations, if your photographers don’t know the light or how to use flash, you may get really bad pictures. On the other hand your wedding might happen during golden hour or get lucky with soft light. In this case, with perfect conditions, you can just take any picture anywhere you like. In this case any wedding or general photographers will work for you.
These ideal conditions are nice to hope for, but in order to be covered under any circumstances, there is another type of wedding photographers, professionals. These are specialized guys who have captured a lot of weddings. They know their equipment, they know how to work in any kind of light, they know what kind of pictures they need to get. Most importantly, this specialist knows how to speak with people. They know how to speak with a bride and groom. They know how to make the nervous and excited bride and groom photogenic and happy. So they will look good in the pictures. They know how to be in the center of the wedding and not distract anybody from the wedding itself as they capture their pictures. It can get overwhelming having everyone’s phones and cameras out. “Can I take a picture? Can I take a picture? Can I take a picture?” No, because in this case everybody will be distracted and it will take away from the experience.
A professional wedding photographer is somebody who has enough knowledge and experience to look at any situation they have to capture, along with everything that is not ideal, and make it right in order to deliver beautiful images to their client. Every time.