I was doing photos for some clients and we came to the conversation of wedding photos. This poor couple had an awful wedding photography experience and were gracious enough to share it with you.

I mainly want to share this because I feel that it’s super important to really get to know your photographer and do your research. These guys were married ONLY 3 YEARS AGO. Which means this was totally recent. You hear lots of horror stories with people getting married 10+ years ago, but it still happens today.

Thanks again Allison for sharing your story.

PS. If you’re reading this in Google Reader you won’t notice the issue, but I apologize if my blog doesn’t look like there much formatting (spacing, paragraph breaks). Still working on fixing that. Bear with me.

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My wedding photos made me cry, and they weren’t tears of joy.

Hello Everyone! I am so excited to guest blog for Tamara! My first guest blogging experience.

A few weeks ago Tamara did a photo shoot for me and my husband. The reason? We didn’t get engagement photos taken and our wedding photos are terrible. No really, like the worst wedding photos you have ever seen.
Before we get to the photos, I’ll give you a little bit of a back story…
I was living in northern Idaho, and our wedding took place in Reno Nevada (no I didn’t get married in a drive through chapel, Reno is my hometown). Because I was far away my mom was doing lots of the leg work for the wedding. I would find vendors and locations online and then she and my aunts, cousins, and maid of honor would go check them out, I think they actually quite liked this part, and then report back to me, and we’d make a decision on each particular item. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t that stressful for me either!
When it came time to look for photographers, my mom told me that she had been talking with some ladies at her gym, and that she had a couple of names for me to check out. Most of the photographers had websites, but one woman didn’t. We both checked out the websites, and my mom went to the office of the woman with out the website, but I didn’t. I took my mom’s word that her photos were good. My mom and I narrowed it down to two photographers, the woman who didn’t have a website, and a guy who did.
Through this process I discovered that one of my friends from high school who had recently been married had used the woman photographer. I sent a facebook message to my friend asking about her experience, she responded that she had had a great experience and pointed out to me which photos on her facebook page were taken by this photog.

The photos all looked nice. My mom told me that she preferred the woman’s style to the mans, and that the woman was a bit more reasonably priced. So we went with the female photographer.

Biggest.mistake.of.my.wedding. Seriously.

The worst part? She was great on the actual day! She was personable, yet directive enough to rope the bridal party and families to where they needed to be for
our “requested shots.” Almost. There were some key shots that we don’t have. We have zero pictures of: just me, the entire bridal party together (bridesmaids,
groomsman, the two of us), and only one or two of just the two of us. Even that could be forgivable to me, if the photos were good. But they aren’t. They are
terrible. Photos have weird shadows on them, all of the pictures of the ceremony are blurry, the pictures of our reception are all dark. I have better pictures taken by my aunt who has a basic DSLR camera that she uses as a hobby.

It was a huge disappointment to receive photos like this after our wedding.

Fast forward a few years to our photo shoot with Tamara. I was really hoping that the session would capture “us” in a way that our wedding photos didn’t. And it did. I LOVE the pictures. Even though we aren’t wearing our wedding attire, I already want to replace every wedding photo in our house with these photos.

So moral of the story? Seriously research your photographer, and if they don’t have a website? Forget about it.

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Stay tuned tomorrow for pictures from the Kaptein’s photo session with Tamara Kenyon Photography.