A Photographer's Job

Wedding season is in full swing for all wedding vendors. During the wedding season, which usually runs from April through October, all wedding vendors are hard at work to ensure that your wedding is all that you expected it to be. I feel as a wedding photographer, we have one of the toughest jobs of all the vendors.

Most people think that all the photographer does is show up the day of the wedding with a BIG expensive camera and take pictures. Well, it might have been that simple during the days of film but when technology moved into the digital age everything changed. During the days of film, the photographer would drop off the film at the lab and return to find prints which had been professionally altered by the lab. Now with the digital age and Adobe Photoshop, the photographer takes the pictures, downloads the images to a computer, manually adjusts each image and sometimes adds artistic effects, backs-up the files, and sends them out to be printed at a professional lab or uploads the images to a website for viewing.

Depending on the number of images taken at the wedding and the number of weddings your photographer does each month, can play a role in how long it will be before you see your proof images. Most photographers I know require 4 to 8 weeks to process images as proofs. And your thinking, why so long? It's because most photographers are taking hundreds and sometimes thousands of pictures at each event and giving each image personal editing attention.

And if you have a photographer who offers photographic products other than just prints, then the photographer's job gets even bigger. Photographers must continually attend professional conventions and trade shows if they wish to stay up to date on all the latest product trends. Because of these changing trends your wedding album will NOT look like your mother's wedding album. In today's market, some professional photographers are adding custom designed storybook albums to their list of products. A custom designed storybook album is a one of a kind wedding album which is designed just for you. This is usually a 10 week process for the design, print and binding of the album. So now the photographer has switched hats... he/she is now an album designer. In addition to albums, most photographers offer a variety of products such as canvas gallery wraps, metal prints, DVD slide shows, photographic CDs, custom cards, novelty products and more.

So as you can see a photographers job is much more than just taking a picture.