Wedding Photography Tips - 10 Things you must know before hiring a wedding photographer
How to choose a wedding photographer in Chennai: 10 things to check before you book
You have four photographers' Instagram pages open and they all look good. The portfolios are strong, the prices are in the same range, and everyone sounds confident on the phone. So how do you actually tell them apart?
We've photographed over 500 weddings in Chennai and across India since 2013, and we've sat on the other side of that first call more times than we can count. Here's what we'd check if we were choosing.
1. Match the style before you compare the price:
Look at whose photos you keep coming back to, and work out why. Some photographers make everything bright and soft, others go darker and more dramatic. Neither is better, but one of them is what your wedding album will look like for the next forty years.
Compare on that first. Price is easier to judge once you already know whose work you actually want.
2. Ask who the lead photographer is, and who else is coming?
This is the question most couples forget, and the one that matters most.
Plenty of studios take several weddings on the same date and send whichever team is free. You meet one person, you like them, and on the morning of your muhurtham someone you've never spoken to walks in with a camera.
Ask directly: will you be at my wedding, how many others are you covering that day, and who else is coming with you? We book one wedding a day, never two. Rohan and Puja lead every wedding, with a team of five to ten including us, sized to your day, all people we've worked with for years.
3. Hire someone who does this for a living!
A cousin with a good camera will shoot your wedding for free and you will spend the rest of the day wishing he hadn't.
A wedding is long, unpredictable and lit badly in places. Someone doing it as a favour is also a guest, which means he's eating, dancing and catching up with family, and the frame you wanted is gone. There is no second take.
4. Camera Shy? Embrace the Pre-Wedding Shoot Warm-Up:
Most people have never been photographed properly and it shows in the first hour of the wedding day.
A pre-wedding shoot fixes that. You find out how it feels, you learn what to do with your hands, and by the wedding you've stopped noticing the camera. It's the reason couples tell us they felt comfortable, and it isn't a talent, it's just practice.
5. Set aside time for portraits of just the two of you!
Somewhere in a day of three hundred guests, you should get half an hour where it's only the two of you and us.
These end up being the photos you hang on a wall. But they only happen if the time is protected in the schedule, because on the day itself there is always one more relative to greet. Ask your photographer to plan it with you in advance.
6. Editing takes weeks, and that's the right answer:
Good editing is not a filter. Every frame worth keeping is selected, colour corrected, finished and arranged into an order that follows the day.
We send a short set of highlight photos within 10 to 12 days so you can announce the wedding and share it. The rest typically takes 10 to 12 weeks. Ask any photographer for these dates plainly. Anyone promising a full wedding in ten days is not editing much.
7. Better cooked than ‘RAW’:
Many clients mistakenly use "high resolution" and "RAW" interchangeably, but they are not synonymous.
A RAW file is a camera sensor reading, not a finished image. It requires the photographer's expertise and post-processing to become the final work of art.
Think of RAW in digital as equivalent to a film negative, often termed Digital Negatives.
Don't expect RAW files; anticipate expertly post-processed full-res JPEGs as the ultimate deliverable. Ensure your visual narrative is in capable hands
8. Should you get your album printed or not?
Photos on a phone get scrolled past. An album gets taken off a shelf when someone visits, and your parents will open it more often than you will.
There's something different about holding the day in your hands rather than swiping through it. If the full album isn't in your budget, print something smaller, but print something.
9. Let the photographer who shot it print it
Online photo books are cheap, and the difference shows in the printing. Skin tones shift, blacks go grey, and a photo that looked right on screen comes back looking like someone else's wedding.
The person who edited your photos knows how they're meant to look on paper, and checks them before they go to print. It's the last step of the same job.
10. Start looking early!
Good photographers in Chennai get booked well ahead, especially around the busy wedding months when most families are fixing muhurthams.
Six months out is comfortable. A year is better if your dates fall in a busy stretch. We take on 20 to 25 weddings a year, so our dates tend to go earlier than most.
Still deciding?
Tell us your dates and where you're getting married. We'll tell you honestly whether we're free and how we'd cover your day.