DSW Photography

As our business has expanded, so has our website. Welcome to the new and improved dswphoto.com.

Due to a problem we had with a recent wedding, we will now be charging a returned (bounced) check fee of $30, in addition to the value of the bounced check. Also, if you choose to pay with a check, there will be a minimum turnaround time of 2 weeks to make sure that the check clears.

Some photographers in the area have non-refundable deposit of over $250, some want half of the final amount due before the wedding. We will still offer our affordable rates, and will still continue to require only a $100 refundable (up to 30 days before the wedding) deposit, and still offer you the opportunity to pay in full at any time up to the day of the wedding.

We are currently in the process of uploading all of our past weddings to the photo site SmugMug. This is a wonderful site that will allow us to store all of the pictures we take in full resolution. What does it mean for you?

• Free, password protected gallery of all of your pictures for you to view, download or print from
• You can share the private link to your gallery with family and friends
• Anyone can order prints of any of the pictures
• Since the pictures are store in full resolution, the site can also serve as a backup in the event that you lose your DVD

Another neat service offered through SmugMug is the ability to order photo books from their site. Currently they have agreements with other companies to produce these books. Summer has created a book of our wedding through one of these companies, and is currently working on another book with one of the others, so we hope to be able to show you examples of what you can create. For now, we do not plan on offering a package to make these books for you – it is somewhat time consuming, and thus would probably be fairly expensive. As one of our couples put it, “It would be a fun experience for us to make one together after we are married.”

Greetings reader. Dan from DSW Photography here. I have decided that it is time for DSW to join the blogosphere. In coming days, we will be adding some posts about some of the recent weddings and engagement sessions that we have done.

For those of you who don’t know us, we are a husband and wife photography team in Columbia, MO. I grew up with a father who had some very nice film cameras, used mostly for landscape and travel photography, but occasionally did a few weddings. Ever since then, I’ve had an interest in photography. I have shot in the past with Lieca and Hasselblad film cameras, and have been shooting with Nikon Digital SLRs since 2004.

I moved to Columbia in 2005 to be near my then girlfriend, now wife, Summer. We were married in July of 2006. Up to this point I had used my photography skills for smaller events. When we were searching for a photographer for our wedding, we soon realized how expensive wedding photographers were. Our photographers (I link to them since they do wonderful work, were great people, and they are targeting a much higher pricepoint than we are) were wonderful, and even let me have the ‘digital negatives’ (higher quality than you would normally get from a JPEG image) to all of our pictures. Their price at the time was within our range, but they doubled their price for new clients before our wedding, and they have gone up quite a bit more since then. Before we decided on them, we saw many other photographers with much higher prices – $2,000 seemed to be the average for the Columbia area, and some were even around $5,000. You do get what you pay for – for $5,000 you get very detailed photojournalistic coverage of your wedding day, usually some nice extras like a custom made album, etc. However, the price of the photographer would have been more than all of our other wedding expenses combined.

Not everyone can afford $2,000 for a photographer. Not everyone can spend even $2,000 on a wedding. Especially with the struggling economy, we felt it was time to incorporate and start offering affordable wedding photography in Mid-Missouri.

As a couple, we have shot four weddings in the last year, and are already heavily booked for 2009. We have recently started to offer engagement sessions, and have been overwhelmed by the demand for these sessions, even now that it is starting to get below freezing in Columbia.

Please stop by our website, take a look around, and give us a call (573-823-5058) or e-mail if you are interested.

Stay tuned for some samples here on the blog!