Question for brides (about shopping for photographer)?

Say you go to a wedding fair where you get to see a million vendors. When you walk in you are handed a book of flyers from many of the vendors. In it is an ad for a photographer which has beautiful photographs but no prices. It just says, "Wedding photography starting at $1200. High Resolution digital files available."

If you go to the booth you can get the prices.

Would you be more likely to consider the photog if the prices were already there or would you be intreagued enough to go hunt down the booth to find out what the prices are and see more samples of her work?

And if you didn't see her ad before you got home, how likely would you be to call her and find out more about her prices?

I'm assuming you're a photographer and you're trying to get into the mindset of your customers.

Well, starting at $1200 is not bad, but I would wonder whether that means for barely anything, just a couple of hours maybe. But that is certainly low enough that I wouldn't mind calling and asking for more details about the packages. If it didn't say anything at all about prices, I would assume they are expensive -- but this would not necessarily put me off if I really loved the pictures.

As for hunting down the booth, it all depends how annoying that would be to find, whether making a phone call is less trouble. If you could list the location of the booth in the ad, it might help.

Only basic prices are usually advertised, because the actual cost all depends on what you want your photographer to do and for how many hours he or she will be there. I mean, there's the pre-wedding pictures, the ceremony itself, then the after ceremony pictures, then the reception pictures of all the events, dancing, toasting, cutting of the cake, throwing the bouquet, etc. It all depends on the package you want. Most photography students who are working part time charge less because they need the experience for their portfolio. Get as many estimates (and look at their sample work) as you can.

If I went to a wedding fair, and didn't see the ad before I went home, the odds of me calling are low. I tend to be of the opinion that about 10 vendors for any one are sufficient (and I'm being really lazy and have only checked out a few for each position I want for my wedding).

If the ad had information on what was included in the base package and what else was available. I might call, if I really liked the pictures.

But honestly, the pictures themselves are not the main worry when picking a wedding photographer - how good the photographer is is a bigger deal to me. I was at a wedding recently where the photographer was walking all over the church during the wedding, snapping pictures. She stopped the wedding twice to take pictures. After this, she had the gall to come up during the reception and ask me to pose for a picture with my fiance (she had taken pictures of us already between the wedding and the reception). There is no way that the pictures can justify hiring a nightmare like that. A page of testimonials would have much more effect if I was hiring a photographer sight unseen like that.

Look at the advertisements and check out their website. Most have ballpark figures and galleries on their website so you can work out - within a range - if they are going to be way too expensive or close to your budget.

If you like their work and their costs are within a reasonable range of your budget give them a call and talk about what you want. You can work out what you can afford from there and see if they can meet your needs.

Our photographer had a few prices listed, ranging from cheap to mid-range. Once we got talking to him everything was negotiated according to our budget / likes / output (album, cd etc). We eventually got a combination of about 3 packages to suit what we wanted and it was right in line with our budget. We missed out on a few things like thank you cards or extra prints that we really didn't need anyway to gain extra pages in our album.

You need to sit down with them at some point and go through their work. We found some photographers had display shots that were very different in quality from the final product. Some put a lot of work into their web shots or expo displays, but the albums aren't so well put together.