Wedding industry = horrible websites
19 December 06
A majority of people reading this blog know that I recently became engaged. So naturally, when one gets engaged, they begin planning for a wedding and honeymoon. Seeing that I have worked with creative professionals before and think I have somewhat of a discerning eye (I should be stoned for my horrible website, but I at least I know it's horrible), I wanted some say in nearly every piece of the wedding planning.
One of my first tasks was looking at photographers. When we booked our reception hall, Christina and I were given a magazine about wedding planning. One section talked about photography and showcased the work of a few studios. There was one I was particularly impressed with (not naming names to spare the guilty) because of the combination of portrait and photo-journalistic photography and how their artistic background came through on all of them. I was quite surprised that with all the strange lighting conditions a photographer can experience at a wedding, the photos looked amazing - like they were all staged.
I wanted to check out even more of the photos and thought I would head to their website. Wow, what a disappointment. I felt like I was back in 1999, where everything was in Flash, including the navigation. Beeps and other sounds occurred every time you rolled over a link, and some links didn't even work properly if I used Firefox or any other browser outside of IE. What gives?
I can understand the showing photos in Flash because I don't want you stealing my copyrighted work bit, but everything? And if you're a photographer and you have an eye for art, you're telling me that you look at your website and think it's good enough? Doesn't anyone realize that it takes tenths of a second for a person to glance at a page and decide if they trust you and your company?
And to top it all off - all the really good photographers won't (or are very reluctant to) hand out the digital photos once they are done touching them up. I'm beginning to understand now that when photographers shoot your wedding, the photos are under their copyright, so you must pay them each time you want to make a print of their photograph.
That seems awfully strange to me. Aren't you photographing this for me? Aren't I paying you to take these photos for me so that I can use them in whatever way I want later on? If I choose to pay you to make me an album, then I'll do that. If I choose to take my photos and create my own book, I'll do that too. And I'm willing to pay a couple thousand to make sure I get great photos from you. And I'll, with a formal signature of course, even let you use my photos to promote your business in any way you want.
I understand that by doing this, photographers are essentially loosing out on a lot of money in reprinting costs. But hey, raise your rates until the loses can be essentially mitigated. In the day and age where younger people are using their computers to organize their lives, who won't want high-res photos of their wedding? Yet people continue to pay a premium and don't really get that much in return. Why haven't these photographers heard of programs like Aperture on the Mac, and iPhoto with their book printing services?
But I digress - finding other photographers in the area is relatively easy, if you look in multiple places, although their websites typically stink and they turn me off to ever wanting to talk to them. And this goes for every other part of the wedding industry, I'm afraid. It's like investing in a reception hall. As long as it's in a nice location, and people are still renting the place out, why invest money to make it better? That's a terrible attitude, and that's what seems to be happening with their websites too.
What I think would be cool? Do a cork'd for wedding photographers. And I want to see photos there - good ones. Ones with higher resolution, no low image quality when saving as JPEG, and I want to see several of them. Oh, and I want the digital photos when they're done.