Your Memories Must Be Captured... Professionally

Mr. Fox must have been a Japanese tourist in his former life. He has this camera:

Mr. Fox's Memory Box. Source.

...and he takes it everywhere. It doesn't matter if we've been there four times before ...in the same week, he wants to document the experience and keep track of our "memories". But what this really means is that pictures of him, if they exist, look like this:

Mr. Fox: Self Portrait, hard at work.

Fox derrieres in Times Square. Mr. Fox is taking photos, of course.

...and pictures of me, of which there are copious amounts, tend to turn into this:

I wasn't mad, I was simply letting my inner artist free.

Of course I want to look nice in the pictures and smile for the camera, but that really only works the first 8 times or so. After that you tend to get a bit, uh... creative.

But I'm not complaining (Though I suppose I'm ranting just a bit).

Yet in spite of Mr. Fox's obsession (yes, obsession) with capturing "the moment" on film, in actuality, he had to be convinced about hiring a wedding photographer.

You heard me right: Convinced.

And it was a hard sell. A really, really difficult one. (Yet still easier than the whole golf cart thing.) He didn't understand why we needed to pay someone to take photos when we had so many friends with cool cameras. His reasoning was that there would be like 400 shots per minute taken during the event due to the plethora of cameras our guests would have. How could we possibly need anything more? Especially if the service is going to cost more than €700. In his mind €700 was more than enough to pay for a photographer. He didn't get why any of them were priced higher. Honestly, I would have loved it if we could spend this (relatively) small amount of money and get great photos. But it just wasn't going to happen, as our search concluded.

Between the two of us, we received 8 offers from various photographers from the Loiret Region marriage guide and various internet searches. They were all in French. They were all vastly different. We sat down together and attempted to make a comparison. (What this really means is that Mr. Fox sat down to read the offers and I went to the various websites to view their digital goods.) These were our conclusions:

• It was impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison of these things
• French wedding photographers favor the risque
• French wedding photographers are overwhelmingly male
• Price means absolutely nothing compared to quality

It felt like we were making very little forward progress. What now? Let it marinate and move on to other things.

In the meantime, I grazed wedding blogs, like you tend to do when you're planning a wedding, and I struck gold!!! One of my faves, Parisian Party, put up this little tidbit of lovely: Barbie and Ken's REAL French Wedding. When I saw this I simply fell in love. The quality of the photos was fantastic. The details were just too good. And it was freaking Barbie and Ken. What little girl who played with these dolls didn't try to do the wedding thing?!?!

I immediately hunted down the photographer on the net and combed her website to see if this one photo shoot was too good to be true. But it wasn't. (insert dance of joy)

So I sent a request for an offer and crossed my fingers, toes, eyes, and anything else that I could, waiting for her reply. And guess what?

She's within our budget!!!

Source.