Awesome Sunday Surprise

A friend of my in-laws showed up today carrying a gift: a USB drive, filled with videos from our wedding! We had never seen these before 😍

@maique wow that is awesome! I wish someone would show up with better photos from my wedding as the photographer we had did a less than stellar job 🤦‍♂️

@ericmwalk We were very lucky, and one of my friends (an amazing photographer!) managed to fly down to the island for the wedding. The photos were awesome! We have looked at those hundreds of times. But these videos, low-res from the camera their friend was carrying, are just too good!

Getting a decent photographer can be hard, especially when you don't know them and have the pressure of the wedding looming over you. Portfolios can be quite deceiving too... Sorry he didn't perform as well as he should have.

@ericmwalk my wife’s friends have a photo I took at their wedding instead of one from the photographer they paid. And although I’m pretty good with a camera, I assure you they didn’t do that because I’m a world class wedding photographer. Rather, the images they got back were, uhm, suboptimal. @maique

@lukemperez A LOT of wedding photographers here are not great either but, then again, there are a lot of them, they can't all be brilliant. It's probably one of the areas where a lot of photographers end up, not because they wanted, but because there's not a lot else to do. I'm privileged to know a few that are wedding photographers because they think it's what they want to do, they work hard at it, and are amazing.

@maique that seems right. In grad school I toyed with the idea of getting into it as a side hustle. Then I decided against it because I realized to do it well, really well, would take a real commitment of time and energy that I just didn’t have (I was, after all, writing a dissertation and had one, then two kids).