Freeze Frame

I was fairly lucky when it came to finding our wedding photographers. I stumbled upon an amazing team of wedding photographers through a post on the fabulous OffBeat Bride website (where being different is celebrated and not used as ratings fodder by TLC) and fell in love. But a nagging little voice in my head kept telling me to at least peruse a few other photographers before making a final decision. So I did…and boy oh boy was it an eye opener. All the sites looked the same and they all had the same flaws. This got me thinking. How exactly did so many websites across so many states and locations end up looking so very similar? Then it hit me. There must be some sort of wedding photographers’ website code of standards! I imagine at a wedding photographers convention somewhere this occurred:

Convention Chair: Now that this internet thing has gotten popular, we all need to decide on a set of standards for wedding photographer websites. The more annoying and useless, the better. Suggestions?

Convention Attendee #1: Everyone loves sappy love songs! Let’s have them running ad nauseam on all of our sites! And make it difficult for visitors to turn it off!

Convention Attendee #2: I happen to have a cassette single of Jeffrey Osborne’s “On the Wings of Love” in my car!

Convention Attendee #3: I have Air Supply’s greatest hits! And Pat Boone’s Songs of Seduction! Those are bound to make all our visitors want to hire us!

Convention Attendee #4: Might I suggest this new thing called Flash to showcase our awesomely repetitive wedding poses? And make sure each individual picture is hard to click on because Flash is moving too quickly? I want to make sure potential customers can’t get a good look at the quality of our work.

Convention Attendee #5: I think it’s crucial we also have a section that prattles on about how unique we are when we’re really just like everyone else. And we should throw out the term “photojournalism” even though we don’t really know what that means.

Convention Chair: All great suggestions! How about pricing information?

Convention Attendee #6: Good lord, no! Were you raised in a barn??? We can’t offer that kind of information on our sites! Just make a vague statement about the importance of quality and artistic expression. That'll make them feel guilty about even thinking of such trivialities.

Convention Attendee #7: I agree wholeheartedly with #6 (I assume they’d know each other’s names, but I’m not creative enough to come up with clever ones before I’ve had my morning tea). And if they care at all about how their wedding will be perceived, they won’t have a budget. And I think we all agree we wouldn’t want to work with someone concerned about their budget.

Convention Attendee #8: Man, I’m pumped about Jeffrey Osborne! Whatever happened to him?

Convention Attendee #2: I know, right? I mean have you listened to the lyrics of that song? “On the wings of love! Only the two of us, together flying high!” Pure poetic genius!! In your face, William Shakespeare!

Convention Chair: #8 and #2, I think we’re getting a little off the subject here. Although I do agree that some of Jeffrey’s best work was overlooked. Now, as for information about the areas we service. Might I suggest we put that under a tab labeled something entirely different from “location”? That way visitors will fall in love with our work only to discover almost too late that we don’t travel to their city?

Convention Attendee #9: And they’ll be so desperate to hire us, they’ll be willing to pay for our travel expenses to and from the wedding! Excellent, excellent idea, Convention Chair! #3 was so wrong when he said you have the leadership skills of a drunken chorus girl.

Convention Chair: He said what now??

At that point, I’m thinking names were called and some sort of dance battle occurred to settle the disputes between the convention chair and #2. But the results of the convention were undeniable: websites with crappy love songs blaring in the background as a visitor clicked endlessly trying to find a shred of useful information. Or as I like to call it, domestic torture.