Covid did a lot of things to a lot of industries. What it did to wedding photography specifically is create an entire class of photographers who saw a gap in the market and filled it with great marketing and other people’s work.
I am not being dramatic. This is real and it is happening in your market right now.
When the world shut down in 2020, a lot of working photographers lost their income overnight. When weddings came back, demand exploded and supply was short. That window attracted people who understood hustle better than they understood photography. They built Instagram accounts. They learned SEO. They ran ads. They got good at looking like photographers without necessarily being one.
And couples, who are already overwhelmed and do not know what to look for, booked them.
The portfolio problem
Here is how a photography portfolio is supposed to work. You shoot weddings. You edit the best images. You put them on your website. That is it.
Here is how it actually works for a lot of people in this industry right now. You find a styled shoot to participate in. A styled shoot is a fake wedding. Someone rents a venue, hires models, borrows a dress, arranges flowers, and invites a group of photographers to come shoot it. The whole point is to generate portfolio images without having actual clients. It is legal. Everyone in the industry knows about it. Almost no couple booking a wedding photographer knows about it.
I have never done one. Not once. Every image on my website came from a real wedding with real people who actually hired me. I did not dress my friends up on a mountaintop to make my portfolio look better than it is.
Styled shoots are not inherently evil. But when someone’s entire portfolio is styled shoots and highlight reels from one or two good weddings, you do not actually know what you are getting.
The highlight reel problem
Every photographer looks good in a highlight reel. You pick your 30 best images from 500 weddings and put them on the front page. Of course it looks great.
What you want to see is a full gallery from a real wedding. Not the greatest hits. The whole day. Getting ready, ceremony, family formals, reception, dancing, the end of the night. That is where you find out what someone actually does when the light is bad and the timeline is running late and the mother of the bride is in a tough spot and there is nothing pretty to shoot.
A lot of photographers do not show full galleries because full galleries tell the truth.
The one question to ask
Before you book anyone, ask them this: who took the photos in your portfolio?
It sounds like a strange question. It should not be. If they shot every image themselves at real weddings with real clients, they will tell you that immediately and probably think the question is funny. If they hesitate, or mention styled shoots, or say something vague about collaborations, you have your answer.
The wedding photography industry got a lot more crowded after covid and not all of that crowd came in with the same intentions. Some of them are great. Some of them are very good at looking great. There is a difference and your wedding photos will be the thing that shows it.
Ask the question.