What to ask a Wedding Photographer before booking from the point of view of a wedding videographer.
1st. Ask for public liability insurance, this will rule out any cowboys and tell you your photographer means business; this will also give you peace of mind as every year more wedding venues are asking for it and they might refuse any vendor that doesn’t have it.
2nd. What cameras is the photographer using? Some old models like the Nikon D3 and the Canon 5Dii or previous had such a noisy shooter that I witnessed some photographers being told by the priest to stop taking pictures during the ceremony as it was very distracting/disrespectful.
Also if you’re having a more cinematic wedding video where audio from the day is used, this distracting noise cannot be removed afterwards.
3rd. Does the wedding photographer uses zoom lens or primes (fixed focus 35mm, 50mm, 85mm), a photographer with a zoom lens will be noticeably further away from you than someone using primes, it is still ok and might even get better photography results to use primes if your photographer uses two camera bodies with different primes, if shooting with only one camera with primes this will cause problems as he/she’ll move around quite a lot; this has been one of the biggest problems I have encountered when shooting video, this type of photographer is prone to get in my shots more often as he/she gets really close to the couple.
4th. The use of too much flash, together with the shooter noise, this can be one of the worst nightmares for a wedding videographer, specially if your style is more cinematic where you deliver a shorter and more perfected film.
You can tell how professional a photographer is by the use of his/her flash.
The use of off camera flash can achieve amazing photos. I have witnessed fabulous photos from Ronan Palliser, Paul Callaghan and Greg from IG Studio using this technique.
Lastly; be it a sole trader or a company, you should always get a contract for the service you are booking, this is the only way you’ll be protected in the future. It is amazing still nowadays the amount of couples that booked someone on the cheap side, paid the deposit and then never heard of the vendor again.
If you want to avail of a better deal, look for combined photo and video packages, it not only gets cheaper but the two professionals are bound to work better as they are used to work together very often.
Happy planning.
