Mission Failed

Yesterday was the much-anticipated photo selection day! To show our appreciation to Peiwen, our coordinator, Vivi, our makeup artist and Kenny and Jack, our photograhers, we bought a cake from Glace at ICON and a small card for the La Belle team. And they promptly shared it on Facebook hah.

Our small appreciation for La Belle team

The original plan was to not top up any photos and stick with the 36 poses and 24 pages that our package includes. We have seen so many couples forking out additional thousands of dollars for the photo top-up and thought that it was really not worth it. Although wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but it is just not logical to pay $80 per additional photo. Actually, many people think that way, but many times, when it comes to them choosing the photos, they tend to succumb to it hah. We are one of them.

Although more than 200 pictures were taken in our one-day photoshoot, only 114  were available for our selection after filtering by La Belle. Initially I thought it shouldnt be that difficult to eiminate 2/3 of the pictures! How they did is they separate the pictures into different series, with each series containing 3 – 4 pictures usually. Hence, we are advised to select by series instead of by individual pictures, as that will make the album design much nicer. After looking through all the pictures once, we began to eliminate series. We are overall quite pleased with how the pictures turned out, so that increased the headache we had when eliminating series.

The nerve-wreaking photo selection

After much deliberation, we were left with about 9 series for studio photoshoot and 17 series for outdoor photoshoot. Hence, we went through another round of elimination and finally 8 more series were chopped and we were left with 18 series (total of 58 poses).  With that, it means we need to top up 12 more pages to the album (from 24 pages) at $130 per 2-page, and top up 22 more poses (from 36 poses) at $80 per pose. Hence, total top-up will cost a staggering $2,540!

$2,540 is indeed too much for us, as much as we like the pictures. Hence, we spent some time discussing and negotiating and finally a deal was struck. Our final package at final price of under $2,000:

• 20 series with 65 poses, 40-page album
• Full return of selected poses soft copies in hi-resolution and edited
• Upgrade to PVC pages (thinner and more durable) from the standard cardboard pages
• Trade-in mini album and table-top framed picture (since not much use for us)

This totally burst our budget for photography. If guys can have their way, most will not pay extra for top-ups (we really can do with just 36 poses hah). We gave in just so to make our missus happy. But of course, always remember to keep it within your means.

Our next appointment will be in November when they are done with our design layouts!