Kind of. Let's not forget that most wedding photographers explicitly own the rights to the photos they take of your wedding, and have print and digital packages they explicitly push both to you and to your friends and family as part of their offering. Some wedding photographers don't even offer the digital pictures as part of their base packages.
Our wedding photographer gave us a DVD with everything and an explicit release to do anything we wanted with them. She was very forward thinking and she seemed to be doing very well for herself.
most wedding photographers explicitly own the rights to the photos they take of your wedding
Like most things, that's negotiable. When I went looking for a photographer for our wedding, one of the first questions I asked was "How much extra do you want for a copyright assignment?"
The additional charge varied from $0-500. The ladies we chose -- though primarily for other reasons -- were in $0 group.
If you push the issue, you can get your full res digital photos. If nothing else, find a photographer who is trying to break in to the business, and who is still small time. That's what we did for our wedding, and we got really great photos (both posed and candid, as the photographers were actually a husband-wife combo, one doing each), as well as a full dvd with every single photo they took, and the rights to do whatever we wanted with them.
