Why hire a wedding photographer?
It goes with out saying, many web sites will tell you about booking your wedding photographer far in advance, to place the budget on getting a good photographer for the day as the memories are which you'll keep forever and can only do the once, and friends of the family may get it all wrong.
You would be forgiven for thinking that a photo is a just a photos, this is not the case I can assure you. The professional photographer takes into account lots more things than meets the eye and this difference can compare to a child with some crayons to van gogh (not turely that bad)
What work will the photographer do, that my friend cant? Well this is simple.
In many cases you friend will have a domestic consumer camera of around 3-5 MP, these cameras are what is called "point and shoots". They maybe great for 7x5" images but when it comes to larger images the difference soon shows over that of a professional digital SLR.
Professional cameras also works a lot better than a P-A-S, there set up different and the internals work differently, hence the difference in price which is around 15 times more.
Composition of the images take a great part in a final image, the lines of the image, the colour and the lighting all are integral to producing a image that's pleasing to the eye. You'll see a pro take a lot of photographs at different angles and heights just to get that "perfect" shot where as the "old friend" takes one of two for you to pick from. Take a look at these examples:
Both these images were taken using my consumer camera on the same day with two different users. As you can see there is two distinct qualities, One reportage portrait and a formed traditional family portrait. I'm sure you can tell the professional against the amateur?? which goes to show, not even having a good camera will help some people take a good photograph.
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Colour from a compact point and shoot can be far off what the actual colours really were on the day, even some of the highest priced consumer SLR type cameras in good hands can be pretty poor and I often show the difference if requested and required. When you visit the gallery, View the images which were taken, some on a consumer grade camera some on a SLR and some on a top of the range pro DSLR camera ranging from 3MP to 12.7MP.
Then there are the organisational skills, and oh boy, they are needed at a wedding. Typically every wedding no matter how well planned is chaos. To get the group portraits style takes work just to ensure that people are in the correct place and the right people are in the right photograph.
Wedding photographers normally select the best images for you and on average out of every 6 shots taken there is a single good photo, bearing in mind that there is some where near 1000 images taken if not more by your professional photographer depending on the style of the photographs required. The raw images are then processed by digital means using professional software to give the colour's the correct balance and iron out the picture (touching up) to give it that final finishing look fit for the king and queen.
I have seen some "interesting images" taken by family and friends, head and feet missing, wonkie camera, blurred and one where the camera lens was so dirty, every image was almost whited out. If you have a photo that they have taken and you wish to have corrected then we can fix these in most cases. With the cost of wedding photographers many people are opting for students or selecting photographers who are "just starting out in weddings". You will be surprised how many times I have been asked to "fix" photographs because of this..
Unless your friend will sit down, edit all the images, correct the mistakes and even take a good shot using a high MP SLR digital camera of a good brand name, then its not worth while "risking" them taking the photographs. Ideally ask a friend who has got married using a professional photographer and then ask there friends for the photos that they took and compare the difference. Remember the photographer set the people up for the group lay-out shots not the friend. If you willing to take the "risk" I have a few documents that may help them as well as training courses available.
