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Wedding Photographer Consultations, What to Ask | Wedding Tips

It’s the busy season for wedding photographers and other vendors.  Over the holidays, a lot of couples get engaged.  Congrats to the newly engaged couples!  When people reach out to us, we always prefer to have a consultation.  The consultation is something that we try to do with each inquiry.  This is an investment of time to have Wedding Photographer Consultations.  It’s also a good way for us to see if our personalities blend well together.  In the end, it’ll help you choose your wedding photographer.

Not too long ago, we got a series of inquiries that were clearly from a magazine or blog.  I applaud you all for doing research on what to ask, but some of the questions that didn’t even apply to us.  Even so, we felt like these people weren’t interested in working with us.  Instead, I felt like they were interested in checking a box off of their list of vendors.  That’s alright for them.

“This is an investment of time to have a Wedding Photographer Consultations.  It’s also a good way for us to see if our personalities blend well together.”

We invest so much time into researching and reviewing where we could go to photograph a couple.  From their engagement session to their wedding day, we put careful thought into everything.  It felt off to be treated like something on a checklist.  It felt like we weren’t really the right fit for each other from the get go.  That’s okay.  It’s part of the process, I guess.

One thing that I did want to do was to provide a list of actually beneficial questions.  These are questions that actually matter when you have wedding photographer consultations.  They’ll help narrow down your photographers to the right ones.  It’ll help in getting the answers that matter when planning your wedding.

1. Do you have liability insurance?

If you want to have an amazing wedding at an expensive venue, then you better make sure that all your vendors have liability insurance.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had wedding venues ask for Certificates of Insurance when working there for the first time of the year.  It’s not a big thing as our insurance company faxes them out for free.  Still, this is something that I stress when talking to up and coming photographers and newly engaged couples.  When having your wedding photographer consultations, ask them what kind of insurance they have.  It’ll almost immediately help filter the professional wedding photographers from out of the crowd.

2. How long does it take to get the wedding images?  Does the contract state that time?

I have heard horror stories of wedding photographers taking months, and sometimes even over a year to deliver images to newlyweds.  It’s frightening to hear these things because it gives photographers a bad name.  Again, this is a very quick and easy way to filter out the weekend warriors from the professionals.

3. How do you store our photographs and do you have a backup system?

Professional Wedding Photographers use hard drives like no other wedding vendor out there (except videographers).  We went through one of our hard drives last year.  Not as in filling it up with pictures, but as in them crashing on me and permanently losing all of the images on there.  Fortunately for us, we know that this can happen and we have backups.  Ask this during your wedding photographer consultations to see what they say.  Some photographers only backup once, and that’s okay.  I say, the more, the merrier.

All three of these questions can help in finding out who the professionals are out of the crowd.  I think that the most important question of all though is number 3.  Storing of your images is so important.  Even if they use film and digital, make sure to know what they do with the images, film, and scans.

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