Summarizing My Wedding Photos This Year… Without the Bride and Groom

Who thinks wedding photography has become a bit predictable this year? Boring, even? Sure, the first time you see a teeny tiny couple lost in a massive landscape, it’s impressive. Or a backlit couple in profile. Or a couple shot through loads of out of focus lights. Or hand in hand, silhouetted, between fairy lights, having just stepped over a prism and climbing a mountain (because that’s what happens on a wedding day).

I’m not saying this is poor photography, far from it! The standard of wedding photography just keeps getting better and better. But I have to stop looking at this stuff. It’s stifling my creativity seeing the same shots reworked and refined over and over again with different couples.

I find myself longing to see an imperfect, unscripted moment, giving me a glimpse of the reality of a wedding day. After all, that’s really what a wedding day is all about, isn’t it? The couples friends, their relationships, the people they surround themselves with. Aesop got it right: “A man is known by the company he keeps”, and it’s the people and the stories of how their lives are intertwined that help define a person, and a couple.

So when I came to put the obligatory end of year blog post together, I couldn’t bring myself to churn out my versions of the pictures you’ve all seen a thousand times already. To be honest, they’re not nearly as spectacular as everyone else’s! I had to look deeper than a set of fashion portraits featuring two people which happened to be taken on the same day they married each other.

I set myself a task:

Summarise my wedding photography in 2016, without showing a bride or groom.

Now, that’s not as hard as it sounds. Of course, a lot of what I shoot on the day is totally centred around the bride and groom. But Aesop’s quote above drives my philosophy for photographing a wedding. It’s what I concentrate on mostly: showing the characters, the friendships, the atmosphere of the wedding.

Watch this photo-film below, and listen to Cameron’s Dad talking about what’s important to him on the wedding day:

(OK, so there’s actually seven pictures out of the 113 where you can see a Bride or Groom, but it’s not very obvious, and they’re definitely not the focus of attention in the image.)

There are a lot of children in these pictures, as well as bridesmaids, grandparents, mothers and fathers, and a couple of what could be classed as landscapes. These are the things, as well as a bride and groom, that make up a wedding. Without them on the day, it’s just two people getting married. A legally binding agreement, with witnesses. That’s not a wedding. And a load of beautifully-lit and well-constructed portraits of two people on that day is not wedding photography.

I believe that this is wedding photography.

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