How to Get the Best Photography for Your Wedding Day 1

This chap­ter will advise you on how to research and choose your pho­tog­ra­pher. Chap­ter 2 will be about how to make plans together with your pho­tog­ra­pher — explor­ing ideas for your day, fig­ur­ing out what shots you want and get­ting com­fort­able with the cam­era. And finally, chap­ter 3 will be about your actual day — how things might run with your pho­tog­ra­pher and how to get the best shots.

The research stage — choos­ing wed­ding photography

1: Book a pro­fes­sional photographer

If you want fan­tas­tic pho­tos from your day, make sure that your pho­tog­ra­pher is a pro­fes­sional. A key rea­son for this is that a pro­fes­sional will know in advance where to be for cer­tain shots. But equally as impor­tant, a pro­fes­sional will be able to han­dle all sorts of “pho­to­graph­i­cally dif­fi­cult” sit­u­a­tions. You may not have that gor­geous sun­shine as that Cal­i­forn­ian wed­ding has that you’ve been look­ing at, and your venue might not be spa­cious and filled with amaz­ing nat­ural light.

Your pho­tog­ra­pher has got to be able to han­dle any kind of sit­u­a­tion — know how to man­u­ally adjust cam­era set­tings in a split sec­ond, know what to do for strongest of sun­shine as well as pour­ing rain, and quickly see how to get the best out of any loca­tion. A pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher will also ded­i­cate the time and plan­ning that he/she knows is nec­es­sary before­hand, in order to get every­thing as you want it on your actual day.

2: Com­pare!

When look­ing at dif­fer­ent pho­tog­ra­phers’ work it’s impor­tant to know that every pho­tog­ra­pher is dif­fer­ent to another. Every pho­tog­ra­pher will have their own style, dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence and train­ing behind them. Here are a few hints of what you can look for when fig­ur­ing out what you like:

• How do the images make you feel? Would you like to have this style of wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy from your day?
• Are the shots pro­fes­sional: Are they sharp where the main focus is, are they detailed, is the light expo­sure good and do you like the fram­ing and composition?
• Are the moments well captured?
• What style do you like? Many wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phers might be prac­tic­ing or have a back­ground in other styles of pho­tog­ra­phy as well — such as fine art pho­tog­ra­phy, land­scape, fash­ion, pho­to­jour­nal­ism, etc — which prob­a­bly will be promi­nent in their style of wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy. Here are some exam­ples of the cur­rent trends in UK wed­ding photography:
  • Edi­to­r­ial (Inspired by magazines)
  • Pho­to­jour­nal­ist /Reportage
  • Con­tem­po­rary and edgy
  • Fine art photography
  • Cre­ative portraiture.
  • Or per­haps you’d pre­fer some­thing more tra­di­tional and posed.

Look at the post pro­duc­tion tech­niques and the image com­po­si­tions. There are many ways for the pho­tog­ra­pher to process the RAW file from the cam­era in to color or black and white. Colours can for exam­ple be gritty, vin­tage, crisp and nat­ural, or sat­u­rated. Black and white shots can for exam­ple be slightly toned, grainy, non grainy, very con­trasty or not contrasty.

And there are many ways that a shot can be exe­cuted — it can be a total snap, or the pho­tog­ra­pher could have been very care­ful with what has been included in the image and paid a lot of atten­tion to the com­po­si­tion. Com­po­si­tion can eas­ily be explained as “all the ele­ments in the image” + how a shot has been framed, and this is a part of the photographer’s style.

… As you can see, there are a few things to think about, when fig­ur­ing out what you like! Here are a few exam­ples from my wed­ding port­fo­lio to illus­trate what to look for in images:

Pho­to­jour­nal­ist / reportage style wed­ding photography

A com­mon style in Eng­lish wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy, aimed to cap­ture moments as they hap­pen — here fol­lows some examples:

Note:
“Com­po­si­tion” is the ele­ments within, and fram­ing of the image: This shot above and the shot below are both photojournalist/reportage style shots cap­ture moments as they hap­pen , but con­sid­er­a­tion has also been taken to the com­po­si­tion — with the repeat­ing mir­ror reflec­tions in the shot above and the fram­ing of the cou­ple in the image below. Com­po­si­tion is very indi­vid­ual and part of the photographer’s own style.

Edi­to­r­ial style wed­ding photography

Inspired by mag­a­zines and with the aim to tell a story in images, edi­to­r­ial shots are slightly directed by the pho­tog­ra­pher to suit each indi­vid­ual cou­ple and style of wed­ding, and is quite pop­u­lar for por­trait ses­sions with the cou­ple or the bridal party.

Some exam­ples of dif­fer­ent styles of black and white images…

Above: A nat­ural, fairly con­trasty but non — grainy black and white

Above: Grainy, old fash­ion style of black and white

Above: Cold toned black and white

Above: Warm/cream toned black and white

Dif­fer­ent pro­cess­ing tech­niques for color. There are many dif­fer­ent ways for pro­cess­ing colours as well. In this exam­ple below, the shot on the left has been processed with a method that brings out light­ness and nat­ural colours, while the shot on the right has been processed with a vin­tage tint­ing. Every pho­tog­ra­pher has their own way of pro­cess­ing images and dif­fer­ent styles suits dif­fer­ent wed­dings, so think about what would work best for you.

TOP TIP: When com­par­ing pho­tog­ra­phers on a com­puter, note that a lower qual­ity screen will make the pho­tographs look lower qual­ity. And your com­puter screen might also be badly color — cal­i­brated, mean­ing that the colours don’t look cor­rect. Make sure you com­pare pho­tog­ra­phers on one and the same com­puter — oth­er­wise, a screen that is of bad qual­ity or badly cal­i­brated, will auto­mat­i­cally make a photographer’s pho­tos look of lesser qual­ity. Some sites — such as Face­book do an auto­matic com­pres­sion as well, which might make images look of lesser quality.

3: Meet your wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher in person!

This is the per­fect oppor­tu­nity for you to ask all those ques­tions that you need answers to, and dis­cuss cer­tain shots or things in gen­eral about your day.

This meet­ing is also very impor­tant for mak­ing sure that your chem­istry is right, and that you can com­mu­ni­cate with each other. It is impor­tant that you feel that your pho­tog­ra­pher has ideas for shots and sug­ges­tions and solu­tions that will suit you. It is equally impor­tant that the pho­tog­ra­pher under­stands any ideas that you might have, to know what you expect.

Tips on where to look for a wed­ding photographer:

• Online, using search engines and directories
• The wedding/bridal blogs — look through the Spon­sored list­ings on the side of the blogs as well as fea­tured real weddings
• Wed­ding magazines
• Wed­ding fairs, where you get to meet the pro­fes­sion­als in per­son and see a cross sec­tion of their work there and then.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first part and that you have found it help­ful in your mis­sion to find a wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher! Next arti­cle will be about The plan­ning stage with your cho­sen pho­tog­ra­pher.
Writ­ten by wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Louise Bjorling