Weddingbee Blog

Our photographer Nicole Polk called me a few days before Christmas with some really great news: our wedding photo albums were ready to picked up! I was so excited because they arrived just in time - I was planning to visit my parents in Chicago and wanted to present one as a gift to my mom. We met up with Nicole and she surprised us with the beautifully wrapped gift boxes. She added her Polka Dots Portraits logo by designing stickers and gift tags for each present.

(*Along with my reviews of our photographer & professional albums, I’ll add some advice in how I chose my wedding photographer)

1. Search high and low for a photographer who provides a fabulous wedding package.
I have to admit when I began searching for a photographer I was surprised how much it cost for wedding photography in general. Some of the best photographers have rates that are around $4000 and above for taking photos of your wedding day, not including photo albums which have to be bought separately through the photographer or online photobook services. I really wanted to have professional photo albums because the quality is suberb compared to photobooks that are available to the general public. I initially started looking for photographers by viewing their websites, checking out their portfolios and the packages/rates they offered. I came down to a few photographers and Nicole really interested me because of her unique style of capturing photos. She also did an amazing job designing photo album layouts. Nicole showed me examples of her photo albums and the quality of her work along with the album designs was just breathtaking. I decided to choose the fine arts albums because I really liked the thick archival fine art pages and colors are so clear, rich and brilliant.

For our package we decided to get two mini photo albums, one large photo album, and DVD proofs. The package was very affordable for what she offered to us:

I was really impressed with the largest album, here are some detailed closeup shots:

I love the matte-like texture of the cover. Unlike the albums I’ve created from Blurb which have a glossy finish, these albums won’t leave fingerprints and will stay beautiful for years.

Close-up shots of the thick pages and the binding of both wedding albums.

Nicole’s stylish logo is found on the back cover of our albums.

A peek of my mom’s photo album:

A few pages from the large photo album.

2. Get to know your photographer!
We decided to have an engagement session with Nicole and it was a really fun and stress-free experience. She had an interesting idea for the location - we met her at a prairie field in the Bucks County area. I remember while she was taking the photos I was asking myself, how are these photos goin’ to turn out? When we received out photos we were really impressed how beautiful they turned out and I felt a huge amount of stress lifted off my shoulders. I was confident that Nicole would do an extraordinary job on our wedding day. Here are some of our engagement photos that were featured on her blog:

During our wedding reception, our guests raved about the guestbook! It was a unique idea and the thick pages allowed us to use a black marker without having to worry about the ink bleeding through the pages.

3. Sometimes two cameras are better than one
Nicole had an assistant photographer, David Zaveloff, who also did an amazing job on our wedding day. While Nicole was with me as I was getting ready, David was with Mr. Bell Pepper and the guys. Mr. Bell Pepper is kind of a sentimental guy and he really liked that there were a lot of photos of him and the guys before the wedding. For the major events on our wedding day, we had both Nicole and David take photos simutaneously. The ceremony was a challenge since it was short and the location was difficult to shoot with the multiple stairways. Both photographers were running around from one end of the balcony to the other, and they successfully captured every moment possible.

A few photos of Nicole and David in action on the day of our wedding:

(photos taken by our friend Carroll)

And a few examples of two different viewpoints:

*the balcony view*
(photo taken by David Zaveloff)

*looking up the stairs*
(photo taken by Nicole Polk)

*at the table’s edge*
(photo taken by Nicole Polk)

*a different view with our guests*
(photo taken by David Zaveloff)

In addition to the extraordinary photos they captured for our wedding, Nicole chose very unique locations for our wedding portraits, one being this red brick wall, which is located in the back of a pretty well known theatre. Does anyone from the Philadelphia area know the name of this theatre?

Here’s a little hint of the location, it’s just a little stroll from the chinatown gate.

Overall, we loved our experience working with Nicole Polk from the moment we were engaged, to our wedding day photos, and the day after photos.

She’s truly all “about the details” and she made every moment so special through the lens of her camera.

ed. note: please see our editorial policy.