There is plenty of advice around telling you how to go about finding the "right" wedding photographer. Most can be summarized in two sentences: make sure you like their photographic style; and make sure you can get on with them. I want to talk about the idea of photographic style - a question I have touched on before, but from a different point of view.
As you begin your search for a wedding photographer, you will soon find people claiming to be a Photojournalistic wedding photographer, or a Contemporary wedding photographer (the most common buzz words at the moment) or they might identify with one or another style... Unfortunately, what one photographer calls Reportage another might refer to as Journalistic while other photographers might say it's "just" Candid photography.
Comparing different photographers' work, you might not see much difference, no matter what the photographer tells you! On the other hand, a particular photographer's style might be different to what you expect from their claimed style - especially if they describe themselves as "artistic". So this is the first in a series of articles to try to sort it all out. Each post will be supported by a slideshow of sample images on Vimeo.com
In general, we can agree that there are probably five reasonably distinct styles of wedding photography: Traditional (sometimes called Formal); Photojournalistic (also called "Candid" or "Reportage"); Contemporary ("Avant Garde" or "Moderne" - with or without the "e"); Storybook (AKA "Fairytale"); and Artistic.
There are not many purists in the wedding photography field (thank goodness), so you will not find many Candid photographers for instance, who refuse to shoot formal groups...but there are some, so be careful.
I am going to deal with each of these styles in separate posts, starting today with the Traditional Style and you can see examples of photos from my collection at Vimeo Video stream.
Traditional Wedding Photography requires a time commitment from the Bride and Groom, and photography can come to dominate the flow of the wedding to accommodate the need to set up shots and pose subjects. The photographer’s aim in the classic style is to create posed photographs to be displayed in a portrait album. It is built around a “shot list” , a step-by-step checklist, to make sure every “standard” photo is taken (e.g. the exchange of rings, first kiss, signing the marriage register, walking down the aisle as husband and wife, family groups, cutting of the cake, bridal waltz etc.) together with specific pictures the bride and groom requests.
The photographer's role is to obtain beautiful, traditional poses capable of high print quality and to ensure this, they need to control lighting, positioning, expression, body alignment, the background, the way the dress flows, the relationship (physical as well as family) of different people in the various group shots. It is the photographer’s job to set up the shots and then direct, encourage, position, relax and animate their subjects to ensure they are seen at their very best. This takes time but the results are often timeless portraits ~ or portraits that are a reflection of our time and the photographer’s art.
Many weddings are formal occasions which is why this type of wedding photography has stood the test of time. With careful lighting and expert posing, traditional wedding photographers can create a lasting family heirloom of your precious memories.
We call it traditional, but it is a traditional that goes back only a little way in time. Until the late 19th century, people didn’t pose for photos on the wedding day at all. The well-to-do might pose for a portrait in their best clothes before the wedding. By the end of the century they might stop by the studio in their wedding clothes afterwards, instead.
At the close of the century, a photographer might be hired to bring his view camera on its heavy wooden tripod to the church - but you needed to be pretty wealthy to afford that, sort of like turning up in a helicopter instead of a limousine! Really, with equipment so bulky and lighting quite primitive, wedding photography was a studio practice - when it was done at all. Couples who did have a wedding photo typically posed for just one portrait. We didn’t really see wedding albums until the 1880s, which is also when wedding presents, neatly “posed” on a table, and the wedding party, started to appear in the photos.
It was only after the Second World War that photographers started treating the wedding as an "event". Freelance photographers, with their roll film cameras and the new “flash bulbs” started turning up (usually uninvited) at weddings; they sold their photos to the bride and groom and to the guests the same way as street photographers were doing - pay your money, take a ticket; the photos will be ready to pick up next week. In a sense they were the “shoot and burn” brigade of the day, exploiting lost-cost and immediacy of the new technology and (despite the low quality photographs that often resulted), putting pressure on professional photographers to start working on location.
Photographers who responded by bringing a lot of bulky equipment to the venue found they still couldn’t compete - they couldn’t capture the wedding as an event. They either exchanged their half-plate cameras and even their single plate Speed-Graffics for (comparatively) light, multi-shot roll film Rollei and Hasselblad cameras or dropped out of wedding photography. By the 1970s, 35mm was king, accelerating the evolution of wedding photography into the styles we see today, including the popular documentary and photojournalistic styles of photography.
No comments:
Post a Comment