AD Photography

26 Oct 12 Fri
Yay, we settled our AD photographer already! Have been searching for a photographer for the past month. Emailed 30+ companies to ask for their quotes and looked at the various works by them. It is amazing how prices can vary from $800 - >$4000 for the same kind of service. Frankly, after seeing one website to another website, we are not able to really differentiate the works by everyone. Moreover people only post the better ones online, so everyone look like they can do good work. The market for photography is sooo saturated. So we did not see the point of engaging a photographer for a few thousand dollars. We eventually focused on the photographers that charge around $1000.

In the end, we decided to engage Alan Dai from Mirage Pictures. He charges only $800 for 10 hour of AD photography, which includes a free album with 400 4R photos developed for us. We have read good reviews of him from the perfect wedding forum, and people all say that he has a good sense of humour and interpersonal skills, and is able to make people smile naturally. So we decided to make an appointment and meet up with him. His schedule is really packed! When I call him the last week, he was booked for weddings the last weekend, and this fri-sun too. He was only able to meet us at 2pm, the break that he has after gatecrash and before dinner.

Alan is a 50 year old free lancer and he doesn't post his works online except for a few photos on his fb. So it was crucial for us to meet him and see his works in the office. He is a malaysian and speaks mostly mandarin. We flipped through his album and it looked decent enough, haha, cos we don't really see the difference between his and others' work. He is also a humorous chap. Most importantly, he is not a newbie who just started freelancing. He has already been in this line for 15 years and is one of the few who still maintained his pricing. I have seen forum reviews about him as far back as 2004, so his experience should be real. Alan's main source of business comes from word of mouth.

He told us that he will take around 1000+ photographs on AD, and will return us all the raw images. 400 photographs will be further edited before he prints it out. He would be taking photos using 2 cameras on that day. I have compared this with the industry standard and find that he takes and edits more photos as compared to the rest of the photographers. So we decided to confirm him as our AD photographer! What is amazing is that he doesn't take a confirmation deposit from us. We only need to pay him the full sum after he develops his album for us! Wow, so trusting. Haha, so this means that while we confirm him, but if we happen to chance upon a better choice, we can still give him up. But don't think we will do that la, see how : ) Below photos taken from his fb.