Wedding photographer confirmed!

I've spent the past few months methodically searching for a photographer. While photography is one of the most important elements of the wedding to us, we're on a relatively tight budget, so we wanted to limit our photographer cost to about 10% of our total wedding budget. I of course fell in love with all beautiful, elegant photographers advertised on Project Wedding, the Knot and on Once Wed, but got discouraged after contacting a few after learning about their prices (gasp!). Anyhow, I've been on a mission to find a talented, personable, reasonably-priced wedding photographer. We also had a few specific criteria....

We wanted to own the rights to our photos, so that we can make our own nifty books and thank you notes and such after the wedding. Obviously, we wanted a photographer who was willing to travel to our venue.  We wanted any packages to include an engagement session, so that we can have a chance to get comfortable with him/ her before the actual ceremony.  Finally, I thought it was very important that we "clicked" with this person.  

I avoided more mainstream wedding vendor websites and tried other means. I asked for recommendations on Facebook, followed leads with friends, and even put an ad on craigslist. These methods garnered me nearly forty candidates, no joke.    Yikes!  How to narrow it down?  Well, some of it was easy, because a few of the photographers' work looked like this:

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Of the forty, I narrowed it down to a list of about 20 potential candidates whose work I really liked.  Out of those, about 7 were in our price range so I gave those 7 a very close look.  Finally, we did interviews with our top three.  Of these three, one was an old friend from high school residing in Spokane, one was a craigslist find, and one was a friend of a friend here in Seattle.  The friend of a friend, the talented Arthur Schwab , won out for a number of reasons.  

First, Arthur's photography takes my breath away. He has a real talent for capturing human emotion, and for creating genuine, natural images. I also really appreciate his eye for detail, and the creative angles he uses to capture these details. Second, his prices are very reasonable.  Third, he is a very pleasant, easygoing, flexible, genuinely nice individual - I can easily envision him mixing well with our friends and family.  Finally, we like that we can do the engagement session here, so that it is one less thing to worry about the weekend of the wedding.  Anyhow, we are thrilled that he and his wife will be joining us for the weekend, we're excited to work with them and get to know them better.  I'm sharing some of my favorite images of his.....