What and Where to Look For Your Dream Photographer
It’s no secret that photography plays a huge role in your wedding day experience. Not only do you spend a lot of time and effort preparing for and creating beautiful images, but a lot of your wedding day is spent interacting with your photographer — they play a huge part in your day. So knowing how to find your Key West photographer is so important.
So how do you find your Key West wedding photographer? Where do you look? What should you look for? And what steps do you need to take to make sure you are getting what you want?
No worries, we here at Plan Your Key West Wedding have you covered. This guide will help walk you through picking your dream Key West wedding photographer from start to finish.
Where Do You Find Your Key West Wedding Photographer?
First of all, where do you find Key West wedding photographers? This can be daunting, especially if you are from out of town, but we have you covered. There are three main ways we recommend to make finding a Key West wedding photographer easy and less stressful.
Referrals
As you start booking your venue and your wedding planner, don’t hesitate to get recommendations directly from them. These will be photographers that they have worked with and whom they trust. This is always a good place to start.
However, sometimes you may have a different style of photographer in mind or maybe your budget is different than what their recommendations can offer. So where do you look if the referrals you receive aren’t hitting home?
You can always do a Google search when looking for your Key West wedding photographer. While you are sure to get a lot of information, you will also find that this is super time-consuming and definitely overwhelming. You will be looking through a lot of people’s websites and manually gathering information.
Plan Your Key West Wedding
Thankfully, Plan Your Key West Wedding has an ever-growing directory of the finest Key West wedding photographers. Our vendors are all local members of the community with so much to offer for your wedding day experience. The online listings make it easy for you to see what photographers stand out to you and even learn a little more about their business without having to do a deep dive into a Google search.
You can find our directory for wedding photographers here.
What To Look For In a Key West Wedding Photographer
Ok, so you now know where to find your wedding photographer. Next, let’s look at what to look for in a Key West Photographer. As you look through listings, galleries, and websites, what information do you need to look for and how do you decide what is important?
Style
We have an entire guide on different photography and editing styles and you can find that right here. But basically, one of the first things you need to decide is what type of photography style you are looking for.
Ask yourself if the photographer captures the type of pictures you want. Do they show a lot of candid, natural images? Or are you looking more for formal, posed images? Do you want a more artistic approach or a more classic one?
And then you need to look at editing styles. There are so many different styles of editing out there. What is important is that you have an idea of what you like and then find a photographer who edits like that. You don’t want to hire a photographer who edits in a darker style if you want a light and airy look.
As you think about what photography style you like, make sure you think past what is trendy or what you see all over Pinterest. Instead, make sure you think about what your true aesthetic is. What can you see hanging on your walls? And what style do you see yourself liking in 20, 30, or even 50 years?
Experience
As you browse photographers, make sure you look at their experience. This is not to say that newer photographers are not worth hiring because this is not true. You can find newer photographers who are wonderful at their job (and usually at a cheaper cost). However, you do need to factor in experience as you wade through the many experienced photographers.
The bottom line is that you want to make sure you are comfortable with the amount of experience that your photographer has.
If you want someone highly experienced, you need to make sure your perspective photographers have that. If you are ok with less experience to save a little bit of money, then be aware of that.
Read Their Bio
Read a little about the photographers so that you can get an idea if you like their personalities and what they value. Photographers put a lot of time and effort into their websites and their listing on Plan Your Key West Wedding — make sure you read it to see what is important to them and if it aligns with your wedding vision.
Look at Reviews
The next step is to look at reviews. Anyone can put together a pretty portfolio and some attractive words, but the real truth lies in what other people say about them.
Look at Google reviews, Facebook reviews, and even the reviews on this listing to see what people say about their experience with the photographers. If people are continually having bad experiences with a particular vendor, it will be revealed in the reviews.
Location
The other thing to look to find your Key West wedding photographer is where the photographer is located. We are very big supporters of using local vendors for your wedding (you can read more about that here), so, of course, we will encourage you to hire locally.
But beyond our personal belief, knowing whether a photographer is local is important because if they aren’t, there is a good chance that you will be responsible for additional fees for travel and lodging. This is just something to be aware of upfront as you start contacting photographers.
Contacting the Photographers
After you have an idea of 4-6 photographers that look good on paper, it’s time to reach out and start gathering information. We don’t recommend contacting more than ten photographers so that you don’t get overwhelmed and start losing track of responses. You can always contact more later if you need to.
As you begin to have correspondence with your Key West wedding photographers, here is what you need to look for.
Availability
First off, it may seem simple, but make sure they are available on your date. This should be the first thing you find out before taking any more of your time.
Responsiveness
The first step is to email the photographers. We recommend emailing rather than calling as it is easier to keep all of the information straight if you have everything in writing.
Look at how fast they respond and how friendly the email is. And by fast, we don’t mean within 3 minutes. A reasonable response time is within 48 hours or so. But remember, many photographers are busy photographing weddings on the weekend and generally take a few days off at the beginning of each week… so it may be several days.
Services and Packages
Once they respond with their service menu and packages, it’s time to really decide what is important to you and what you want.
Budget
Budget is always a factor when looking at packages. How much have you allotted for your photographer and is there any wiggle room if your estimate is a bit too low?
Amount of Coverage
Unless you are having a small, and short, wedding, most normal-sized weddings will want 6-8 hours at minimum. Scrimping on hours to save money may seem like a good idea but remember that photography truly is the only tangible that you take away from the wedding day (except your marriage, obviously). If you scrimp on coverage, you chance feeling disappointed at the number of images or depth of coverage.
We always advise talking to your planner or wedding coordinator to get an idea of how many hours they think you will need. You can also download our wedding day timeline templates to give you some ideas of how to organize your day.
Get Them on a Phone Call
After you have a good idea of who you like, who is available, and who is within your budget, it is time to get them on a phone call or Zoom. Having an actual talk with the photographer is the best way to really see if you like them as a person and if everything you have read online matches up.
We have a whole other blog devoted to questions to ask your Key West wedding photographer and what exactly to look for during your phone call.
Starting Finding Your Key West Wedding Photographer
Now that you have a good idea of where to find your Key West wedding photographer, what questions do you have? Did this help you get started?
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