Cheap Disposable cameras and nobody sends their pictures

A common story.

March 17 2007 was my wedding day.

For months we had planned and dreamed of how our wedding would be like. To preserve the memories, we invited everybody to bring their digital cameras additionally we purchased dozens of disposable cameras and even hired an expensive professional photographer. But when we returned from the honey moon the only person that came through was the paid photographer. The disposable cameras had hardly been used and the promises to send us copies of the pictures from the digital cameras turned out to be well.. false. Click here for our solution.

bad idea #1- Disposable Cameras.

This is the current method of getting candid pictures of your wedding. You put a bunch of disposable cameras out on tables with cards that ask people to use them. What do you get? Well, you get a bunch of low-quality pictures of people sitting at tables, enjoying their meals, a few distant shots of the bride but mostly you'll have unused film. And how much did it cost? $10-$50 per camera!

bad idea #2- Asking people to burn you a CD.

Everybody has a digital camera and knows how to burn pictures to a CD and Everybody is going to proclaim that they will get it all together and mail you a cd of your wedding pictures...Until they get home, exhaustively climb into their beds and sleep. Then nobody can do it- and that's exactly what you'll get in your mailbox. Nothing.

bad idea #3- Hiring an Extra Photographer.

The idea here is that you can Hire a second (cheaper) photographer to run around and take pictures, while the professional photographer takes all the 'good' shots. The plus side is that you get alot of pictures- the bad side is that some photographers are threatened by having a competitor shooting the same wedding. This friction may prevent your pro from doing his 'best' work- and it will definitely deter him from giving you freebies.

bad idea #4- Using a pc as a picture kiosk.

This bad idea says that you can setup a fairly attractive photo kiosk where people can upload their pictures. The problem is that the kiosk is never where the people are. And unless you have several of these kiosks- your going to force your guests to wait in a line when they would rather be out visiting with family and friends. Many of your guests will not know how to upload pictures from their camera. And you must remember that there is food, beverages and possibly alcohol at this event. The last thing you want is to start your new life off by having a newly acquired family member spilling a glass of tea on your computer- ruining it and all your pictures.

bad idea #4- Email the pictures to the bride.

This idea sounds great "on paper" but it simply doesn't work. Everybody takes a few dozen shots of your wedding and then tries to email them to you. The problem is modern digital cameras take really good pictures- which means they are really big. Email will only allow at most 10mb of attachments- a single picture is 3-8mb in size. So if a guest wants to send 30 pictures to the bride- they are going to have break them down into about 20 different emails- each one taking about 4 minutes to send which can your guest a little over an hour and a half to get just 30 full quality pictures to you. Alternatively, if your guest is computer savvy they can reduce the quality of those pictures into basically wallet sized photos and send them with little difficulty. However, in that case you will not be getting the high quality picture that you desire.