Choosing The Photographer

One of the important things to sort out for a wedding is to figure out who’s going to have the responsibility of taking the photos on the big day. This can be a difficult enough task normally, but seeing as we’re getting married in Scotland, choosing a local photographer (1) could be difficult, and (2) could be a bit of a risk.

Fortunately, the World-Wide-Wait is a wonderful thing and finding photographers to consider wasn’t too difficult. Let’s face it, in this day-and-age, if you’re a business and you don’t have an online presence then, well, you’re pretty much dead in the water. Add to that the fact that photographers live or die by the quality of their product (photographs), not having some of these available for people to see easily is again a quick route to failure. Gone are the days of scouring the yellow pages, setting up meetings to look through hard copies of photo albums… thankfully!

So with keyboard at hand, and a quick look through a Google search for photographers in the Glasgow area, a short list of potential photographers was drawn up using the first, most important, criteria: they must have already covered a wedding at Ross Priory! Not living anywhere near the venue, we had to be sure that the photographer already knew the venue, hopefully making the photos on the day easier and better.

The initial short list looked as follows:

1. Pearl & Plum
2. Lorraine Ross
3. Ross Alexander
4. Trevor Wilson

With that sorted it was time to look at each photographer and to try and decide which one would best suit us. To do this I took a pretty pragmatic and logical approach and came up with a list of criteria that each of the photographers was going to be assessed against. These were, in no particular order of importance:

• Price
• Pre-wedding consultation
• Venue visit
• Duration
• No. of photos
• Digital copies
• Photo album
• Photo prints
• Discount

Using their websites and any information I got back from them after my initial inquiries about their availability for our wedding day, this is how they stacked up:

Having put that little lot together, I then looked to see who won each of the different criteria, if there was one of course. This looked as follows:

Putting this together into scores for each of the photographers this gave us the following:

1. Pearl & Plum: 5 (cheapest and mentions discounts)
2. Lorraine Ross: 5
3. Ross Alexander: 5 (most expensive but mentions discounts)
4. Trevor Wilson: 4

All a close run thing, but Trevor Wilson lost out at this stage.

What to do next with the remaining three photographers? Check out their online portfolios of course! So that’s what we did, looking through their work, concentrating on the photos they’d pointed us to from Ross Priory.

This was no easy thing to do, but looking through the photos and their shooting style we both agreed that Ross Alexander was the man for the job. His style of photos and the quality of his work was exactly what we were looking for.

Add to that the fact that he was willing to give a discount as the wedding was on a Tuesday, even if he was still more expensive that Pearl & Plum with the discount, it was a done deal.

Decision made, we immediately dropped him a line to get it booked in. He was thrilled we’d decided to go with him, and he was really looking forward to going back to Ross Priory too!