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How to select a…. (Part One)

Videographer
The best advice that I can offer for selecting a videographer is to make sure that you watch their last two or three completed wedding videos. Don’t let them show you their usual samples. You really want to see what the videographer does week in and week out, not what he considers “sample quality”. Also, strongly consider asking if the raw footage is going to be in High Definition. This might not seem important now since there’s a good chance that you don’t have a HDTV and a very good chance that you don’t even know anyone with a DVD player capable of playing High Definition movies. But this is going to change before you know it. It would be a shame to watch your wedding video on your nice Blu-Ray or HDDVD player and think to yourself “it’s hard to believe how much better movies look today than just three years ago when we were married”. The technology is available now. Insist on it for your wedding.

Cake
Wedding cakes possibly have the widest range of both prices and quality of any of the major purchases for a wedding (next to possibly us photographers). The confusing thing is that price and quality seem to have little if any relationship to each other. When shopping for a cake look at recent photos of cakes that person has done. If you are planning something unusual ask if they have done something similar to that and if they have photos to show. Then the important part, taste samples of their wares. I admit that almost all wedding cakes pretty much taste alike to me. I suspect that this is a failure of my taste buds instead of the cake. Taste the samples. That’s most of the fun of shopping anyway. And, I’ve heard (or hoped I heard) that wedding cake samples have no calories since they are just samples and not real cake (I wish).

Florist
Visit the florist’s place of business at least a couple of times. And one of the times should be on a Saturday (assuming your wedding day is on Saturday). Look at the flowers in the shop. Are they fresh or starting to look a bit brown around the edges? If you go on a Saturday where they have a wedding, does the florist look organized or does it look like they really haven’t done it before. Most importantly, are you comfortable with them? You will plan and work with them for quite a while, if you don’t personally like them you might consider a different florist.