As the wedding season is now in full swing, a post about wedding photography.
"Reportage", "informal", "relaxed", "candid" are all words that have been bandied about for sometime now to describe a particular style of photography most prevalent in the spheres of weddings and also portraiture. It's an attractive concept and something that most couples and families love, since it suggests the antithesis of the stuffy, posed, formal photos of a previous generation, where people had to stand around for ages with fixed smiles on their faces.
However, reportage photography has created its own set of problems, since it gives the quite misleading impression that anyone can do it. After all, if you take enough photos then some are bound to turn out alright aren't they? And digital cameras allow us to do exactly that. This means that couples who may spend thousands on the dress, the cake, the ring, the flowers and the stunning venue, are quite as likely to ask a work colleague who's handy with a camera to photograph the most important day of their lives.
My heart sinks when I come across yet another website purporting to showcase the work of a photographer specialising in this type of work, and instead I see a series of poorly composed and appallingly lit snaps which could have been taken by just about anyone. To compound the problem, some of them will have been "rescued" in Photoshop.
Real reportage photography, by a skilled practitioner who knows exactly what they are doing takes quite the opposite approach. It involves as much thought, planning, knowledge of composition and lighting as its more traditional counterpart. And it's also a lot of hard work.
Consider what would happen if you just turned up at a wedding or a family gathering with your camera and started snapping away quite indiscriminately; do you think that those people would just happen to be in the right place, in front of the perfect background, being lit by the perfect light or wearing exactly the right expressions as you pointed your camera at them? Unlikely. Yes, of course it's perfectly possible to capture some beautiful and quite spontaneous moments by accident rather than design. However, to do it consistently well, when it's pouring with rain or in brilliant sunshine, when there's a hideous sign in the background just where you'd like to photograph the couple, when one of the bridesmaids is having a tantrum or the vicar is being less than helpful, requires many other skills too.
And if you look at the images created by a professional photographer who specialises in this type of work, they will have put a lot of thought into when all the right elements are going to come together to give them the perfect shot - they won't waste time or energy taking a photo if the lighting, expressions, background etc are not right. They will wait for what Henri Cartier-Bresson termed "the decisive moment" before they press the shutter. Each image will be the result of a lot of thought and expertise.
The poses may not seem "posed" in the traditional sense, but the way in which people stand, the direction in which they're looking, how the light is hitting their faces, all these things have to be anticipated and captured discreetly by the photographer, without intruding on those special moments. Two of my favourite photographers who are real experts at this are Jeff Ascough and Mark Seymour. Their work speaks for itself.
So if you're hiring a wedding or portrait photographer and they say they specialise in informal, reportage photography, be very, very sure that when you look at their work, the photographs aren't just the equivalent of "snaps" which anyone could have taken. And remember that "cheap" and "high-quality" very seldom go together - you get what you pay for, and with wedding photography, there really is only one chance to get it right.
© Anna Saverimuttu Photography
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