When select­ing ven­dors for your event, good chem­istry will make a huge dif­fer­ence on your wed­ding day. It’s not as crit­i­cal as the love you have for your husband-to-be, but if you really like and get along with your key ven­dors; you’re off to a great wed­ding day.

I have seen many wed­ding days unfold over the past 10 years, and the one’s that go smoothly have one thing in com­mon, good peo­ple! It doesn’t mat­ter how awe­some the DJs speak­ers are, or how advanced the photographer’s cam­era is, if you don’t like the peo­ple behind them, it will affect your over­all expe­ri­ence. Let’s be hon­est here, the wed­ding day is all about the bride (you know what I’m talk­ing about grooms-to-be). True pro­fes­sion­als will pro­vide ser­vices that put the bride at ease. You don’t want to hire a fam­ily mem­ber to pro­vide ser­vices for your wed­ding, but you do want to hire a pro­fes­sional that feels like they are part of the fam­ily (not the crazy aunt, of course).

Now this doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily apply to all of your wed­ding ven­dors. I’m talk­ing pri­mar­ily about the ven­dors that you will engage with on the day of your wed­ding. This includes wed­ding coor­di­na­tors, pho­tog­ra­phers, video­g­ra­phers, DJs, and to a lessor extent caterers.

Wed­ding sea­son is about to begin and brides are seri­ously look­ing and book­ing. When sam­pling the wares of the local video­g­ra­pher, watch out of the loaded demo.  What is the loaded demo? A loaded demo is a wed­ding video that is pro­duced for the sole pur­pose of entic­ing the bride and clos­ing the sale. Not that video­g­ra­phers shouldn’t show their best work, just make sure that the work you see rep­re­sents the qual­ity of video you can expect from your spe­cial day. If they spent 40 hours edit­ing the demo wed­ding, make sure that they intent to put a at least that much time into edit­ing yours.

What’s the best way to approach this? Ask to see 2 or 3 com­plete DVDs that the video­g­ra­pher pro­duced for clients.  If the video­g­ra­pher is rep­utable, they should have no prob­lem lend­ing you copies to take home so you can get a good look and make sure what they pro­duce is what you want for your wedding.