When planning your wedding, what is the most important decision you’ll make? You’ve already chosen that special someone, but where to go from there?

Let’s face it, weddings in the Seattle WA area can get very very expensive. If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know just how quickly the cost of all of the elements adds up – your wedding dress, hair, makeup, venue, photography, catering, flowers & décor, videography, wedding planner, DJ, entertainment, and the list goes on… With so many important aspects to consider, sometimes staying within budget means making some tough compromises along the way. But as you plan your wedding, there is one particular thing that you really shouldn’t compromise on if at all possible… and that is because it affects everything else…

Consider this: once the food and cake are all gone, guests have gone home, the decorations taken down, and your dress stored away, it is your photographs that will be enjoyed and handed down for generations to come. Would you trust such an important task to the lowest bidder? With all of the money and planning that go into a wedding, does it make sense to settle for your second choice in photographer (or worse) just to save a little money? Selecting who will document your special day is not just another of many decisions you will have to make as you plan your wedding, it is the most important decision. Everything else you paid for gets put away or returned, but the images live on.

With so many wedding photographers in the Seattle area to choose from, selecting the one can undoubtedly be difficult. After all, no two photographers are exactly alike. They vary a great deal in talent, skill, knowledge, experience, shooting and editing style, etc.… So before you let price largely dictate who you choose, an important point to remember is this: a great photographer will be able to find and capture the beauty even in the most mundane or difficult situations, but a poor or inexperienced photographer will often fail to adequately capture beauty, even if it is staring them in the face. Your wedding photographer should be able to create a beautiful, unique story of your day – one that you can share with friends and family, one that you can revisit fondly for the rest of your life.

Stories abound online of couples that spent a lot of money on various aspects of their wedding, but decided to compromise on their photography. They often end up disappointed with their images – images that fail to show how beautiful their wedding story really was. Maybe this even happened to someone you know?

Even worse are the stories we’ve heard of relationships ruined because a friend or family member (who is not a professional photographer) offered to photograph the wedding (often for free or nearly free) and in the end, did not meet bride & groom’s expectations… After all, uncle Joe’s got a nice camera too… and he’s looking to build his portfolio… It’s terrible when this happens and our hearts go out to all involved. Sure, many times it works out… kind-of… But if you really value your close relationships and your wedding photographs, why take the risk? I have even had a few brides who hired a different photographer come to me after their wedding, asking if I could edit their images because their wedding photographer didn’t edit anything for them! What? Others have told me that they had to wait years just to get their wedding images! Seriously? It blows me away! But when you consider a photographer who charges just $2k to photograph a wedding would have to photograph around 50+ weddings/year just to make a halfway decent living, it makes perfect sense. It begs the question, if that photographer’s images are any good, why are they not pricing their wedding packages accordingly?

And then there are those couples whose overall budgets were quite a bit smaller than most, but who refused to compromise when it came to their wedding photography. They made budget compromises elsewhere and their images became a source of great joy for them for years and years to come. Friends and family raved about how amazing they looked and what a beautiful couple they make.

At James Thomas Long Photography, we’ve photographed quite a few couples just like that – couples with smaller budgets, but who nevertheless valued photography. They understood the power that great images would have in telling their wedding story. In fact, my wife and I did the same thing when we were married. We had little money, but spent more on our wedding photography than anything else because we wanted amazing images to remember our wedding day. We compromised elsewhere and we have absolutely no regrets.

There is more to discuss here, so please check back next week for part 2!