Wedding Wednesday - Photographers

I'm linking up again today with Courtney from One Fine Wire for Wedding Wednesday. Just ignore the fact that it's Thursday morning now. The theme for the week is photographers and I wouldn't miss the chance to tell you about mine.

When we first started out wedding planning my parents offered us a certain budget and said anything we didn't spend from the wedding we could keep as a gift. I took it as a mission to get the wedding of my dreams for as little as possible so that we'd have some leftover to put toward a house. Do I really need to tell anyone who's done this that we ended up a bit over budget? At the beginning of planning though I made decisions based almost solely on price and that led me to look at Craigslist for a photographer. I did find several very talented photographers there, one of whom was Lauren Goldsberry. She was just starting to get into the wedding photography game and was offering this killer package of an engagement session, bridal portraits and full wedding coverage for dirt cheap. It was incredible and I liked all the pictures of her's that I saw. We met and really hit it off too. I could see that we had the same ideas about a lot of things and would work really well together. Pictures never really ranked that high on my wedding priority list though. I figured as long as our wedding was documented, I'd be happy. We set up our engagement session in San Marcos by the river where Brian had proposed. She took tons of photos and we had such a good time doing it! Here's my favorite shot

and this is the one we used in the newspaper for our engagement announcement

Click her name above where I linked and you can see several others on her site. Unfortunately, a couple months later I got an email for Lauren saying that she just didn't have the confidence or experience to trust herself with our wedding pictures yet and gave me a chance to get out of our contract. I was very impressed that she was honorable enough and had the integrity to do that. So I took her at her word and started looking for a new photographer, having paid only a trifling sum for that great engagement shoot. I hope that she gains more experience and is able to grow her business as she wants to.

I was a little big more discriminating when I conducted my second search which lead me to Jason Speros. Looking at his portfolio online, I recognized one of my good friends from middle school and talked to her and she highly recommended him and it turned out that my florist who I was in love with had used him also. We worked out a deal to include bridal portraits (which I never ended up getting, my fault, not his) and wedding coverage. We hadn't met at all before the wedding and we actually introduced ourselves in my dressing room before the wedding. I was very happy with the work he did! Sadly, he was using two cameras at the wedding and reception and one of them was stollen by someone at the hotel. Big bummer! There are a few parts of the wedding including the grand march and cake cutting that I don't have pictures of and it's because they were on that camera. All the wedding pictures that I've posted on here before are from him, here are a couple of my favorites from the shots he blogged about here. I would have included more but come to find out snapfish is now blocked at school. Dang it! I'll be posting more of them with future Wedding Wednesdays and other posts, I'm sure. I'm hoping to have some printed out and a book made by our one year anniversary. I think he did an excellent job of capturing the joy of the day.