The secret questions you need to ask
As I run the Atlanta Wedding Photographers Association I get to talk with a lot of wedding photographers, some really good and many really bad. I’m not saying bad as an absolute, rather that they don’t have the required experience yet… but they need to learn on somebody’s nickel. Let’s hope it isn’t yours. So I started to think about how a couple of questions could determine if your would be wedding photographer really knew his or her stuff. As you know in life, it’s not always the price, but the quality that makes the difference. The old saying is that quality remains long after price is forgotten. And quality takes time. So to help you gauge your photographers experience I came up with two questions to ask that are photography specific.
First – ask for your prospective wedding photographer to talk about lighting and reciprocity. If he goes blank, he doesn’t know about the cornerstone and fundamental building block of the photography business – light. He won’t tell you that light diminishes at the reciprocal of its distance, so a certain quantity of light from a point reaching a subject at 8 feet will only be 1/2 that quantity at 11 feet for example. As a tidbit, that is why your camera lens has settings such as 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and so on. They are reciprocity based. In other words a single point light source will diminish in 1/2 at each increment. If you photographer doesn’t understand the importance of this single fact, and how it affects everything he captures with his camera, he is just guessing at the results without knowledge of the reason why.
I am ignoring reciprocity as it relates to light sensitive substances such as film or digital sensors, as film is history as far as the wedding business goes. And although, there are reciprocity issues with multi-second exposures, that isn’t pertinent to weddings. Note that the question related to light.
Without this knowledge, a photographer cannot predict the lighting in a scene proactively and will just “wing it” and hope for the best. Hopefully, not on your nickel.
Next ask about the difference between ISO, ASA and DIN. If you get the blank stare after he says that ISO is the speed rating of the film, or sensor sensitivity you’ll know that he is a newbie. ISO is a standard for describing the sensitivity of film or a digital sensor. It can also be described as the ASA setting as it uses the same numbering scheme but ASA is an obsolete term. DIN is a European standard for measuring speed using a din scale. For example, ISO/ASO 100 is Din 24 and ISO/ASO 400 is Din 27 using a logarithmic scale. If your prospective photographer can describe the general concepts of these rating systems it means that they aren’t new to the business, and that’s what you need to know.
There are many more questions you can ask, but these will get you going.