As an outsider looking in I do admire the willingness of my clients to simply embrace the occasion and have so much fun!
Yet when it comes to photography and particularly wedding photography, I’ve found we can all have a bit of a strange relationship with it. Despite it being so accessible it’s not something we have done professionally often at all. Yet it’s this accessibility that can dilute what real photojournalism is about; telling a story through images. But what if the image happens before any story unfolds?
What if the story never happens at all… and you just have a photograph?
You have an image without any depth, an image that acknowledges for a brief moment you merely existed in that time and space. It lacks any sort of meaning. There is of course no real story involved. A fairly empty experience.
You may have been mislead to see photography as an event, something to have fun with, something to entertain you. This example recently hit the news, where the groomsman kicked the bridesmaid in the face and ripped his pants (that’s trousers for English folk). An extreme example, I admit, but you’ve probably seen various “jumping shots” or behaviors where people are manufacturing reactions or scenarios for the sake of the camera. It’s fun, right?! Maybe… to others it’s maybe a little adolescent, unsophisticated.
But let’s be clear: everyone just wants to have fun. (And I don’t mean like Cyndi Lauper, that triangulation is just a little scary!)
What’s crucial is how you want to experience it on your wedding day. If you’re like my clients, you’re not interested in such manufactured foolishness because you don’t want it cutting you off from experiencing your real wedding day which is happening all around you. The one where you’ll laugh, cry, and experience everything in between. You want to immerse yourself in it so that when you do come to your wedding album you see the real memories that you created. Not just the people you care about, but the things about those people which you love. Relationships and nuances that can’t be manufactured, but are only observed by the right photographer, and those that embrace what they have in front of them.
