Wedding Photo Journalism

Stylish marriage at a stately home 

      A really cool thing happened to Wedding photography in the nineties. (Greatly helped by digital cameras which were faster and let you see your results as you went along) photographers decided to use photojournalistic skills from the field for weddings. This meant they needed some new wedding “rules”. It was time to allow the natural flow of the day, instead of lighting every event with studio lights –technology evolved to allow photographers to use natural light and their flashguns in cool ways. Wedding Photojournalism was all about capturing the reality of the day, getting the truth of the story on film without staging events. In short, keeping it real. 

These angelic bridesmaids found this lovely spot for me

“Most wedding photojournalists … focus on finding moments during a wedding that happen naturally, rather than setting up portraits.” With my background of twenty years (+) in Newspapers this is fairly obviously the route of my choice but while my children were growing up I was not only a photographer but a painter too so the formal portraits are dear to my heart and the client that I want is the one who has found a venue with a river, a lake or a view of the sea that means something special to them and at the same time allow me to create beautiful images in a gorgeous setting.

    Here in Wales I was asked for a period style approach to a recent wedding to suit a particular venue, a genuine stately pile with peacocks to prove it. 
       

Where were you on the wedding day?

       But by the time the wedding took place, the lake at the stately pile, a lake that I had much admired, had become a ditch full of red sand and, nobody told me that the grand entrance, where I stood to greet the bride with a head full of pre-planned images to create, had been dumped in favour of a gritty, hilly track at the back door without an atom of scenic splendour. As I scrambled round to the back of the building, just as the Rolls crawled gingerly down the track, I found myself repeating with considerable force that truly journalistic phrase, “just do it, just do it!”

Arrival of the bride

Wikipedia says: “The phrase wedding photojournalist has been in vogue for at least ten years and has now become almost synonymous with normal wedding photography”. Does that mean it is possibly a bit passé now?

   I don’t know what the next big thing will be, trash the dress never really appealed to me, and nor did the stiff line-ups of the sixties and seventies but the period mood brought on by Downton Abbey I would have liked to do properly. A stately home and sepia toning is not quite enough. Maybe the next period drama will bring in a look more suited to today’s young.

Dreaming the dream on your wedding day

      The important thing, I believe, is that the bride and groom when they look at their photographs remember how they felt about each other in that ‘just married’ moment, rather than remembering any exhausting antics their photographer might have been imposing upon them.