Photographer(s)

I knew that choosing the photographer(s) for our wedding was something that was very important to me.  It's one of those important details that I was willing to "splurge" on, considering you only get one chance to capture the events and feelings of this huge event.  While I know that posed photos are a mainstay of wedding photographs, I wanted our photographers to have a more photo-journalistic style.

Luckily Craig also felt this was an important component of our wedding.  When we though of what we'd like out of a photographer, the first thing I thought of was that I wanted someone who could make us feel comfortable--if you don't feel comfortable, it shows in the pictures.  We also wanted to be able to have printing rights and digital copies of all of the photos.  Our first thought was that our friend Zach, who is an awesome photographer, would do a great job.  You can see his work here.  Then we considered the facts that we didn't want Zach to be "working" the whole time at our wedding, and we didn't want to put a ton of pressure on him, considering he has no wedding photography experience.  So, we decided to find professionals.

Deciding where to start when finding photographers was daunting.  Of course, there are all those facebook ads (at least on my page) for Portland/Seattle wedding photographers--and all of those people charge crazy amounts.  Then there's the Craigslist people who just are in general awful photographers.  We wanted to find someone who would give us digital files, had good editing skills, and could work with our budget considering the number of hours and travel to the venue.  Some other things we'd love to have in our photographer (but probably would not be within our budget): 2 photographers, free travel, complimentary engagement session, and full day coverage.
 
My first choice (with little to no research or hesitation) was a girl by the name of Katy Weaver.  I'd seen her photographs on facebook, and they were awesome--and she was VERY affordable.  Even better, she is an OSU student!  We really liked her style, and the fact that she is "less established" meant that we could have gotten a great deal on a very talented photographer. Unfortunately, she was already booked by the time we decided to contact her.

After that, we googled photographers in our area with little luck, and decided to try Flickr.  Looking under a Portland wedding photographers group, we found several that we considered, but we narrowed it down to two photographers: Gina Emerson, and Mosca Photo.  We loved both of their styles and photo processing, as well as the packages they offered.  After a lot of discussion and comparison, we decided to go with Mosca, although I know we'd both be happy if we had chosen Gina.

After meeting Alice and Josh (our TWO) photographers, we signed the papers, and put down a deposit.  So exciting!  These two are so spunky, up for anything, fun, and very talented.  I still think it's funny that we went with Mosca, considering Craig had said he wanted our photographer to be a fly on the wall...(Mosca means fly in Italian).  There are so many great photographers out there--we really got lucky to find a great duo in Alice and Josh.  I think that things really did work themselves out really well in this case, and I'm so excited to schedule our engagement session with them!