St. Louis Wedding Photographer Selection Process

We finally picked a photographer out of the incredibly saturated market in St. Louis.  I must confess that Justin and I didn’t do a whole lot of searching ourselves.  Like many things so far, wonderful things are falling into our laps. A couple nights we sat on the couch and looked at multiple websites and made a brief spreadsheet of the web pages we liked. Then we sat on that for about a month or two.  In the mean time a wonderfully talented photographer found Justin on twitter and subsequently browsed our blog.  Of course, our first plan of action was to look at his website.  After looking at websites repeatedly, we became photographer website snobs. 

Each new website would have a cheesy sappy romantic song playing in the background. Out of habit, before even entering the sites, we immediately looked for the mute button. Therefore, any website that didn’t play music seemed to be unfairly preferred.  Another annoyance was when each thumbnail or picture took longer to load than a snail crossing a street.  A tip to all photographers . . . websites that immediately load the full size picture after you running the mouse over the thumbnails are so much better to browse. Having to click each individual picture gets monotonous.

After looking at so many websites a divide in quality started to happen between each photographer’s work.  It starts to feel like there is no middle of the road photographer.  You either go big or just bring your own camera that sits in your purse everyday and pull it out for some photos on your wedding day.

So, when Jonathon Pollack started contacting us and promoting his work to us, I was relieved.  His work was really good, and his website was excellent . . . and he found us.  With no resistance we began to give him serious consideration.  We returned to our spreadsheet we made a couple months prior, to see how he compared to those we thought we liked previously.  This is when his work really stood out, and not to mention his reasonable price.  You have to admit, when the price goes down your interest goes up.  You know you can’t pass up a clearance aisle because there might be something you didn’t know you needed.

Luckily in our favor, Jonathon Pollack, is way better than the smashed bag of chips on clearance.  Not too long after reevaluating our spreadsheet, Jonathon contacted Justin again and offered to give us a FREE 30 minutes engagement session.  Justin and I weren’t planning on an engagement session . . . we didn’t think it was necessary.  But since it was offered and it would give us a chance to see what we would look like in pictures instead of strangers, we accepted. We were also excited to see what it was like to work with Jonathon. 

Needless to say, the experience was exceptional.  Jonathon and his wife created a relaxed fun atmosphere that we were pleased to take part in.  The pictures turned out great. The chemistry was perfect. The price was right.  We have a photographer!