Wedding Planning Advice (Cont) My personal experience

So I mentioned in my last article about wedding planning (See the previous article here) that some of it stemmed from a lesson I learnt planning my own wedding.

So back in early 2010 my partner Chris and I finally set a wedding date. We wanted something low key and we were happy to do some of the work ourselves. The fact is getting married in Marysville in 2011 meant we had too. At that time there wasn’t a whole host of options since the 2009 fires. However it was really important to me to get married up there as its where I grew up.

I did some research on costs for our wedding and set a budget of $7000-8000. But based on my research this seemed feasible (and for most of it is was) However we didn’t actually factor in using quality suppliers in some instances.

So our particular problem stemmed around our photographer – one of the most important parts of a wedding, If it’s not for the photographer and/or videographer you won’t have anything to look back on to remember your day, it won’t be documented and you have nothing to show for it. Photos and video are important!  If there is somewhere NOT to cut costs on a wedding it’s the photos and video!

In our instance we were lucky enough to receive our videography from the fabulous Turbo Productions as a wedding gift! (James that runs Turbo Productions and I went to highschool together and have kept in contact ever since) Our videos are amazing – we love them and James was the absolute professional.

Our original photographer however is a different story. We made several mistakes when booking our original photographer:

• We should have asked for recommendations from people we trusted
• We should of met with him before booking
• We should of researched him more
• We should not of booked based on price
• When we did eventually meet with him and got a bad feeling, we should of followed it up then and considered other options. (we met him for the first time 6 weeks before and immediately felt uneasy, but couldn’t put our finger on why)

However we did the opposite of the above list and the end result was us having concerns about 10 days out from our wedding that we had a photographer that was going to show up. The contracts we had signed detailed locations and timelines, yet 10 days out he told us that he under quoted and as a result wouldn’t be at our wedding until 3.30pm (30 minutes AFTER our ceremony started)

He said he was only going to stay at our reception until 6.30pm (we were arriving at 6.30pm)

We spend considerable amounts of time on the phone and in email correspondence with him only to hit a brick wall. He hung up and then wouldn’t take our calls or return emails.

We started looking at other options. Fortunately for us we had several friends use an awesome photographer Dean Phelps from Brandon Dean Photography. He was not booked for our wedding day and was able to help us out. In fact he even offered to work from when I was getting ready, right through the reception.

He is an amazing photographer and we were so happy with our photos, our original booked photographer never did show up, never refunded our deposit and basically vanished off the face of the earth. A bit of due diligence early in the planning process would of saved us A LOT of heartache.

There are many amazing suppliers out there – it is not difficult to find them. Ask friends and family and even other suppliers that you trust already for recommendations. Be realistic with your budgets and consider for example having less photo coverage on your day so that you can have an amazing photographer for where it really counts.

Quality and Experience matters and it is honestly worth every cent to have beautiful memories of your special day to keep forever!

Special thanks to Brandon Dean Photography for your hard work at such short notice.  We will be forever grateful that you were there to capture our day.

Photos in this post are by Brandon Dean Photography