Will your wedding photographer stay hired
after you hire them?
Funny question?...not really, about once a month I get a call from a bride
or her mother frantically telling me a horror story about their booked
photographer dumping them at the last minute because that photographer
suddenly became unavailable to photograph her wedding after having been hired
many months before.
[Example: On 7-28-04: I got one such call today from a frantic mother
of the bride where the photographer they had hired months before had landed
the contract to photograph a US Lawn Tennis event in Indy on this bride's
wedding date, Aug. 14, '04, so that photographer was suddenly no longer
available to do what they had agreed to do months before!
This left the bride scrambling desperately now to try to find a last minute
replacement...which is going to be very hard to do! (My take on all this:
with this wedding already booked, he shouldn't have ever been looking for
or considering doing anything else to photograph on this date, no matter
how important or glamorous the new assignment was!!!!]
My guess is that these photographers refund your retainer when a "better
wedding" comes along and photograph the better wedding instead. I can't believe
that photographers can stay in business doing this, but I guess they can...or
they wouldn't be doing it and I wouldn't be hearing about it so frequently.
I feel so strongly on this issue that I am adding wording to my own wedding
photography agreement that pledges to pay the client an additional $1,000
if I end up doing another assignment instead of theirs on their wedding day.
This is $1,000 that I know that I will never have to worry about paying
out to anyone, because this is something that I simply will not even consider
doing anyway.
This is what you can run into when you hire a "wedding photography specialist"
who also happens to specialize and dabble in every other form of
photography imaginable to earn his living! I am truly a wedding photography
specialist and that is ALL I do to earn my living, too.
And, when you hire me, you know that I am going to be the one that
shows up to photograph your wedding, because I personally photograph every
single wedding I book.
My promise to you is that when you hire me to photograph your wedding, I
will always stay hired and will be there for you on your wedding date.
