Wedding Photography Options - 1 -No Photographer

A typical snap (Oops!)

For this series of posts I want to go into the options that you can choose from for your wedding photography. Specifically, whether you want to go without having a main photographer, whether to use a friend who is a keen amateur, or to pay out for a pro wedding photographer.

To start, I will go into the pros and cons of having no main photographer:

Lets Define This Option First:

This is where you choose to have no photographer, but instead to rely on the snaps that people take through the day on their small cameras and mobile phones etc.

Pros:

1. Its free! (although you will have to pay for prints etc.)
2. No photo session saves time out of the day for other things
3. You will still have some photos

Cons:

1. You wont be able to get formal group shots, these require a level of organisation by the photographer
2. You wont get the artistic reportage style shots which many photographers provide
3. Your photographs are likely to be limited to small group shots
4. There will be no consistent look to your photographs as they will be taken by different people on different cameras
5. The quality of the photographs will be poor due to the inexperience of the users, and the quality of the cameras
6. It might be a hassle trying to gather the photographs from numerous guests who have taken them
7. Your photographs will be in JPEG format, this limits the amount of adjustments/improvements which can be made to the photographs on a computer
8. You will be limited in the choice of albums and print option

Do not be fooled into thinking that a 10 mega pixel compact camera is going to give you similar quality pictures to a professional DSLR camera. There are so many advantages to the professional camera, such as sensor size, lens quality and aperture size, flash quality & strength and the fact that a professional camera can take a picture instantly and continue at a rate of 6-7 pictures per second. When you add in the difference between an experienced professional and a 'happy snapper' the difference grows even greater.

Summary:

In summary, this is a good choice if you are on a very limited budget and you don't really care that much about the quality of the photographs.