Wednesday, November 5, 2008

These Pictures Better be Worth more than a Thousand Words

Its embarrassing. As I have said so far, I don't think I anticipated doing much of anything by ways of planning for this wedding. H really did just tell me to do the honeymoon and that may be it. Now, I am finding more and more that things that were not that important to me are becoming critical to me. A lot of times, this happens when M forwards on some information or gives us a website to check out. Maybe I am so de-sensitized by all the weddings that I have been to over the years that I figured all the amenities that come with the wedding are pretty interchangeable. There is no difference between this invite and that invite. These flowers and those. Anyone can DJ a party, right?

I was wrong. Dead wrong. And I am going to have the pictures to prove it.

Great Pictures! but maybe not for us.

We have a budget. Despite what you read here, we are doing our best to be cost conscious. We think its working, for the most part. One of the areas where we really anticipated saving some money was with the photographer. My Mom has been working weekends at a wedding photography studio for over the last decade. It was something she always loved to do and she and my Dad (who worked there for a while as well) used it as a means to cultivate their love for photography. This studio has been good to my Mom. She loves meeting with the brides (rarely the grooms)(see what I am doing there?). She loves putting together the proof books. Its really something she enjoys. I think in part due to her loyalty to this studio, it did not charge full freight for my youngest brother's wedding last September. This really helped them out. And they really liked the photos.

We understood that that same offer would be extended to us, if we chose my Mom's studio. We thought of the money we could save. The things we could do with it. What if we...*gasp*...came in under budget?!? There was one slight problem. We really didn't like the style of the photographs. This is not to say that they weren't good. The photographer is very good. He was just too traditional for us. We envisioned a pretty lively party - we wanted someone to capture all of that, plus, we wanted a more photo-journalistic
approach - with lots of candid shots. We would do the traditional pics, but really wanted the focus to be on the randomness of the event. We didn't know if this option would be able to do that...but ultimately, we may have been resigned to letting him try. I mean, weddings aren't cheap. This would have been found money.

I blame this one on M. She e-mailed H and I six Indianapolis photographers to look at - a few weren't for us, a few we liked, but one, Nathanial Edmunds Photography, we absolutely fell head-over-heels, we have to have them do our wedding, in love with.
From the moment we opened their "phlog" we were hooked. They had such a style. Each of shoots had a very personal feel, like they spent a week at the couple's home and got to know them and their personalities. If the couple had a little edge - you could tell. The photos told that story. But then, if there was a devout christian couple, you could see that as well from their photos. Plus, they were local - they knew Indianapolis and they knew M.

Had we not seen this site, we may have been OK with the cost conscious option. But the fates intervened...

We struggled with this. I mean, there was a cost-benefit analysis somewhere in all of this photography business. Were we crazy? Yes. And yes, they were more expensive. Were we really ready to spend the extra money? YES.WE.WERE. We had drinks at the Paramount Room that Friday night. As the basement flooded there, H and I talked about all this photography business. It became increasingly clear that the photographs had taken on a new meaning for me...um, us. What was ancillary to the wedding, now has become one of our biggest needs. I mean, in fifty years, this is all we will really have from that day. And we wanted it to be cool and to tell the story of us on that day - or as M put it - the story of the wedding the way our guests saw it. We thought that NEP were the photographers for this...

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

I had warned M that we were meeting to talk about this that night and may drunk text her - we texted her that we HAD to have NEP and she went straight to work on them. The date, we understood, was tentatively booked. Apparently, though, the other couple was unresponsive. NEP was not pleased. There were ultimatums. There were blown deadlines. There was begging. It was really here, that I understood just how competitive this wedding thing is. There are a finite number of quality vendors out there and we all fight like grade schoolers for them. Late Saturday night, in a frantic text/phone call/e-mail/facebook wall post/phone call/e-mail, we got them. Within hours, we were FB friends with NEP, and looking at all sorts of questionnaires. I couldn't sign the contract fast enough.I couldn't wait to share the news with H - who had been in the office all day and then took a cooking class that night (which is basically a reason to power-bomb wine and make mashed potatoes). All of it was exhilirating and I am so excited that we got the photographer that we need to shoot this wedding. I have not been able to stop thinking about it and I am constantly checking their phlog (I will use this word until it catches on) for updates...its crazy to me that something which was so, SO down the list of important things to me in all of this, is now the thing I am most excited about - I cannot wait to see what they can do.


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