Dream Light Art Photography: 10 Questions with Guillermo, Rebecca & Gara

Photographer - Guillermo, Rebecca & Gara

Business: Dream Light Art Photography
Location: Saint Louis, Missouri MO
Experience: 30+ Years
Photography Types: Engagements, Weddings
Profile: Dream Light Art Photography
Website: dreamlightart.com

1. Introduction: What's your story?

Dream Light Art is an affordable perfect 5-star reviewed St. Louis-based wedding photography service with an elegant & natural look at flexible rates that will fit your needs perfectly! We charge by the hour with no set minimum charges. We offer packages from $$ - $$$ with full rights to all your lovely images in multiple convenient ways including on a flash drive and also including an elegant online gallery to easily share with family and friends. If you want a quality wedding photography service at reasonable rates that fits your needs perfectly - please check us out! And check out our super deals here on WeddingWire: A free hour for 8 or more (e.g.: 8 hrs for the price of 7) and up to $400 off just for contracting in Aug-Sept. Please contact us for more details and custom special offers!

Services Offered with Full Rights to all your high res images:

We currently offer six artists whose bios information and artwork can be individually viewed in depth on our website. You are encouraged to contact them and have a good chat. We will be happy to facilitate that. We even offer a discount for doing so!! We offer customized service in every way - we shoot from two-hour elopement sessions during the week to full weddings with two photographic artists capturing beautiful images all day for you. Dream Light Art offers a completely personalized service, where we treat each client as a friend and take great pride in our art and in the quality of our photography services. We provide truly excellent editing/color processing of your images - and they come with full rights - so you get to truly enjoy them as is! We provide you with hundreds of high-resolution images on a flash drive and even upload a gorgeous online gallery in which you can share all your images in an super elegant manner merely by sharing a link with no downloading at all involved. You will be all set to enjoy, share, and archive your hundreds of beautiful images to the Max & Forever!

2. How long have you been shooting weddings? How many weddings have you photographed?

Personally, thirty plus years but I am shooting less and relying on Rebecca Haas and Gara Elizabeth Lacy and three other artists to provide most of the wedding image capture for Dream Light Art. Rebecca and Gara have each been shooting weddings for over 10 years each along with having both earned university degrees in photographic art. They have each shot well over 300 weddings. I have personally shot over a thousand.

3. How would you describe your photography style?

We have a beautiful, elegant, natural style and we specialize in providing our clients personalized service while gathering exceptionally beautiful images that are theirs to keep and do with as they want and they are provided to the client with full rights in the most convenient forms. We also pride ourselves in the quality of our processing/editing. We spend at least a couple of hours processing/editing for every hour we shoot. The quality of the images on our website are truly reflective of the quality of the images you should expect from our photography services except you would get many times more images – at least a hundred per hour of shooting – and they will be sent to you on a large flash drive – usually a 32 gig flash drive. They are truly yours to enjoy and share in any way you choose!! We also upload all the images to a lovely online gallery and send the link to the client so all family and friends can easily view all the images. They can fill a 4K monitor with full detail.

We like to work closely with our clients from the start. Our clients work with their selected photographic artist from the start and it never ends - the planning conversation continues through the wedding day. The better the planning, the more relaxed and enjoyable the day will be for our clients and we like to be able to capture that. We live for the challenge of providing beautiful images form our client's wedding day but that needs to be a two way street - we like to work as team with our clients. We truly seek inspiration from our clients, but we are professional artists and we expect to be treated well and with respect and given at least some necessary freedom to be creative. We don't have prefect reviews for nothing - we know what we are doing but we also want desperately to reflect our client's own creativity and personalities. Once again - our goal is to work as a team with our clients to create a beautiful, elegant, natural collection of images from their wedding day. The quality and quantity of our reviews are a reflection of our success in that regard.

4. How well in advance should couples book their wedding photographer?

There is no best time to book a photographer - but we book as much as two years in advance. If you are getting married in the Spring, book for sure by the middle of January or that year to get your first choice of talent and by the early spring of that year for your first choice for Fall weddings. For the best special deals - check us out a year in advance and we will make you a special great offer!!

5. What are the different packages that you offer and which one is your most popular package?

We actually create custom packages for all our clients – we don’t really have “packages”. We are extremely flexible because of that and we find “packages” to be comparable to shirts coming only in generic small, medium, and large sizes vs true custom tailoring where the custom tailored shirt fits to your unique dimensions perfectly. We want to hear about your unique plans and create a “package” that fits your plans perfectly.

We charge by the hour - currently from $200 to $250 per hour for a lead photographic artist. Larger weddings can get a free hour or more or a free engagement session. If you download our general information pdf from our website, it will explain everything and offer several sample "packages". Second photographic artists at a wedding generally run $180 per hour. Call or text or email us and I will send you a printed version of our information if provide me with a mailing address to send it to.

Another consideration is the fact that we offer "non-shooting assistants" and recommend them, but don't make them obligatory, either. They are $50 per hour and are professional. They work as a team with our photographers - we each have our favorites. You can discuss this with your choice of photographic artist. Our clients may or may not need an assistant for their wedding. Ultimately, the choice is up to our clients, but please do listen to the advice of our professional artists.

Shooting by the hour allows us to be very flexible.

Seven to eight hours are our most popular packages. Eight hours comes with a free extra hour or free engagement session - that is, nine hours for the price of eight or a free engagement session as an alternative. That would be $1760. Half of our weddings include a second photographer, but that is entirely optional with us, as is the non-shooting assistant. All our packages are custom packages to fit the needs of our clients. And they always come with hundreds of full res images - usually a hundred or more per hour of shooting - and with full rights to all of them.

6. Are you the wedding photographer who will be shooting on the wedding day? Who else is there in your team?

The lead photographer will be the photographic artist you chose at the contracting - that artist is named on the contract itself. Our clients will have selected their artist from our portfolio page on our website and will have already meet in person with that artist and found themselves comfortable with that artist and her/his bios information and portfolio and personality. By the time of their wedding day, they may have already had an engagement session with that artist - I recommend that! If you would like a second photographic artist - that is up to you. We can offer you advice about that. A second photographic artist may or may not be necessary for your wedding. We do generally recommend a "non-shooting assistant" at all our weddings. That person helps with everything in general. We pay them well to be professional. A couple of our favorites actually have university degrees in photography but don't want the responsibility of shooting weddings themselves. They would rather be highly paid and productive, professional, non-shooting assistants on the wedding day.

So our weddings can be one lead photographer for a limited number of hours or as many as three team members working all day together to provide our clients with a great collection of images from their wedding day. The lead and second photographic artists will be named on the contract and we will adhere to that.

7. Do you charge a travel fee? For what distance? What does that cover?

Most of our weddings don't have a travel charge, but we do charge travel for weddings outside the metro area or at very hard to get to locations. We are very moderate about our travel charges. They run from $50 to $150 usually. Columbia weddings could be as much as $200 travel from St. Louis where we are based. We will give our clients a travel figure for their wedding when they inquire if there will be a travel charge.

8. Are albums or prints included in your packages?

We offer prints on the gallery we create for our clients but we also offer something better - we offer our clients extremely well color processed/edited images and hundreds of them on a flash drive and full rights to all of them. We often include a large Art Wall Print in larger contracts, but we also encourage clients to purchase prints from the files we conveniently provide from any professional lab of their choice at reasonable prices. We don't hold your images for ransom in any way. But if you want to order prints extremely conveniently from us - we do provide a beautiful online gallery for sharing your image collection with family and friends and prints can be ordered extremely conveniently from that gallery from one of the leading professional photography labs in the country at extremely reasonable prices - like $5.00 for a 5x7 true photographic print with four layers of resin on a polyester backing that will last generations and is perfect for framing. Otherwise, you get the flash drive and can go to any local lab to get your prints produced for you including at a Walgreens for fridge prints and we personally use Diversified Labs in the Creve Coeur area for our locally produced professional Art Wall Prints that our clients love. You can get an 8x10 professional true photographic print with four layers of resin from there for only $2.25 the last time we checked.

We also offer some of the worlds finest albums - with true Italian Leather covers printed and produced in Italy. And we offer them at extremely reasonable prices for what they are. But we also offer locally produced professional albums at very affordable even lower prices. These albums can be checked out on our general information pdf that can be viewed or downloaded from our website at DreamLightArt.com. We also are quite happy if you take your images and produce your own album online - many of our clients do that for extremely affordable prices that we cannot match. Most of these online albums are magazine-style albums with "gutters" in the middle of the spreads whereas all our albums are totally lay-flat hard-page albums with custom designs at very reasonable prices for what they are. Please do check out our downloadable general informational pdf from our website at DreamLightArt.com for more information about our albums including pricing.

9. How long after the wedding will the couple receive the images? How will they be delivered?

We try to deliver the image to the clients within from four to six weeks out from their wedding day. But in the heart of Spring or Fall that can take a week or two longer.

The full res, mid res, and small res images are separate collections of the same images that come to our clients on a 16-32 gig flash drive. The full res images alone are often 10 megs or more each and there could be well over a thousand from a larger wedding. We also create a lovely online gallery for our clients that can easily be shared. These are viewable on even 4K monitors with vast detail - these are very large files.

10. What is your cancellation and/or refund policy?

We schedule payments out in a reasonable manner between the contracting and the day of the wedding. Each payment is technically non-refundable, but we are reasonably flexible and make exceptions depending on the circumstances. Covid has been hard on everybody and we have been extremely flexible with that situation.