Photos you should ask to see before booking your wedding

     When it comes to weddings you want to know your photographer is the best at what they do. When you sit down and meet with them, you see all the previously perfectly posed photos that could soon be of you and your spouse to be.

Discovering Grand Dad’s Dog Tags

     Though, what is it a photographer didn’t show you during the meeting and maybe something you should ask them to show you? Here’s what it is, during the meeting they rarely ever show you the party photos, the cake cutting(maybe), and the candid’s that comprise around 60 to 70 percent of the what is photographed on you and your loved one’s wedding day.

     Now, you may be asking yourself, Tim, seriously, why are you telling us to ask photographers to show us another person’s wedding candid’s?

    Here’s the reasoning behind it. Posed photos are great, they sell really well as images that will adorn your walls for a very long time to come. As time has passed, from the wedding day to the first showing, I find loved ones spend more time looking at the candid’s and remembering those once in a life time moments with friends and family that aren’t staged and try to figure out how to work them into albums and as small mementos.

     I will admit, at first, if a potential client came to me and said those posed photos are nice but show me some candid’s. I would have probably freaked out in the beginning or even recently because I would be worried about what they are looking for in those. Now, I understand they want to be able to see if us as their photographer can capture those special intimate moments with friends and family that weren’t stages and happened by chance. Those moments that come and go as quickly as the wedding day does.

Blink first you lose.

     This may not be something that you would of thought to ask of your photographer but I encourage you too. As a client I would want to know if they possibly got the shot of the bride and brother noticing that grand dads dog tags were on memorial display which were just added by the husband mere moments before they walked in the room. Or that bride and her best friend were having a stair down right before they busted out so weird hillbilly dance on the back of an old farm delivery truck while laughing uncontrollably. Those are the memories you also want to know your photographer can capture and save for a lifetime.

Family moments

     With the two short scenarios from above think back to a close friends or family members wedding that you attended and then later were at their house and ended up looking through their album or box of wedding photos. Chances are you looked at the posed photos but you held on looking at that candid moment photo or page just a little bit longer and relived it and just maybe busted out laughing or started to tear up.

     Posed and candid photos have the power to relieve special moments in your lifetime make sure you have a photographer that can do both.

Sweet Water Clean Rivers Clean Lakes Conference

This past week was a very fun week for Vagabond Photography we had the opportunity to team up for a second time with a great non for profit group call Sweet Water (http://www.swwtwater.org/). This time we were covering their Sweet Water Clean River, Clean Lakes Conference at Discovery World on the Lake Michigan water front. They are a fun and insightful bunch of people, trying to do a wonderful thing by organizing groups and companies and raise awareness to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed to bring it back to swimmable and fishable conditions.

The reason why we really like what they are doing over at Sweet Water besides the obvious is because it gives us the ability to photograph our clients in new(to us) and cleaner locations, in the past we would of passed by because of how dirty and unsafe they were.

Also while at the convention two of the afternoon presenters were from Detroit and Toronto. They both went into detail on how cleaning and restoring/reshaping the water shed in their cities brought people back to the waterfront and revitalized the area. We think this speaks to what Sweet Water is trying doing in our area which we believe can greatly benefit people in general and especially our clients.

The other part of why we this think this is a great thing is, in being good stewards of this blue spinning marble we all live on it is our duty to keep it clean for future generations so we don’t just flush our lives down the proverbial toilet.  In our free time at Vagabond Photography we like to spend our time fishing, swimming and hiking around local waterways so groups like this have a special place near to our hearts. Having grown up around the paper mill belt along the Wisconsin River we can remember times when cleaning operations were under way we would not think about swimming or eating a lot of fish out of the river. Though now it is a great river to go out and have fun on year round. So it’s nice to see several groups trying to clean up the Greater Milwaukee watershed.

We cannot encourage people enough to go over to their website and see what they are trying to do to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed.