My fiancée and I are getting married in Halifax next year (in May 2006). A few weeks ago, we started looking for a wedding photographer. Halifax has a number of good wedding photographers to choose from, so we had some work to do. We found one wedding photographer in Halifax that really separated himself from the crowd. Chris Gallant was the perfect mix of price and style that we were looking for.
We had some requirements before we set out. We needed a photographer that was local to the Halifax area so that we could meet with them and discuss our wants and needs in person. This is a big deal for us because although we are well willing to let professionals do what they do without too much intervention, we need to feel confident that the people we hire have a good idea of what we like and what we want. We also needed our wedding photographer to have strong photojournlalistic skills. Finally, they needed to have some packages that worked within our relatively modest budget.
We spent some time searching online and quickly shortened our list. There were a few fantastic photographers that were simply way out of our price range. There were many others that were within our budget, but we just didn't like their style of photography. After Browsing through the web sites of our short list, we made some appointments and started meeting our potential photographers.
We chose Chris Gallant as our wedding photographer. His packages worked within the budget we were looking for, had a photography style we really enjoyed and had a lot of other details included that we liked. He does colour correction on all his photos, with most of his packages there are two photographers at the wedding and he offers lots of time to cover the event. I really liked the idea of having two photographers taking pictures. This isn't a unique feature by far, but for our price range, it wasn't common at all.
All in all, it was a pretty eye opening experience. One of the things I couldn't help but notice in our hunt for a photographer was that although all the photographers seemed to have websites, they were all over the board when it came to technical issues. Some were pretty good, some were not. Some were down... For a few days... We e-mailed one of them and never got a response at all.
Most of our wedding planning experience has been frustrating (especially dealing with wedding dress vendors but I'll get into that another day). But Chris was great to deal with I'm sure we've made the right decision picking him as our wedding photographer. I'll write some more as we continue to get everything together for our wedding.