Wedding Photography Do's And Don’t's

You’ve spent thousands on every aspect of your wedding and now you need someone to capture the whole event. The day will be a whirlwind and you need an experienced professional to do their job while you do yours. This is not the time to accept amateur offers from family members. You need a professional photographer. But where do you start? How much do you need to spend? And how do you tell good wedding photography from bad? Never fear, here’s our guide to the do’s and don’ts of wedding photography.

Who are you?

Every other part of planning your wedding has been focused on who you are as a couple and how you want to present that to your family and friends. Obviously, your photographer’s job is to capture that spirit in a collage of photographs. And for them to understand what pictures to take, they need to understand you.

As a result, you need to meet your photographer to help them understand who you are and who you are not. Watch out for agencies that are happy to meet with you, but then send somebody else out to do the gig. A lot of detail can be lost in translation, and you want to be sure that your ideas are understood. This is why we prefer freelance photographers to agencies because after you have built a rapport with the photographer, you’ll find you loosen up and are happy to be intimate, playful, romantic or whatever mood you want to pursue with your wedding photographs.

Do Not Strike A Pose

When thinking about the style of photographs you want, The first question that you have to answer is this – are you Ingrid Bergman? Just in case you don’t know who that is, she’s most well know for her role as Lisa Lund in the classic Casablanca opposite Humphrey Bogart. Here’s a picture of her, a timeless beauty finding solace in the arms of Rick Blaine, cheek-to-cheek in an impossibly romantic pose.

So again, are you Ingrid Bergman? No, thought not. The problem is, a lot of contemporary photographers think you are and spend hours getting the bride into poses that make them look like Ingrid Bergman. The result? A lot of photos that look like you are pretending to be somebody else.

Look at your parents and their parent’s wedding photos. None of this dramatic Hollywood posing business went on and their photos turned out great.

Candid Is King

Thousands of photos were taken by our photographer on our wedding day which was distilled won to about one hundred. And out of all of those I have one favourite and it isn’t the one’s where my wife and I were grabbing onto each other like Leo and Kate in Titanic.

It was one of the last photos he took, when we walked into our reception arm-in-arm with all of our family friends clapping and cheering our arrival and the obvious joy we had being together with each other and all of them. And he took the photo from a balcony up above so the angle was pretty flattering for me too.

What I am getting at is that the best photos, not just wedding photos but any photos, are spontaneous. They say the camera never lies and if a photographer can’t capture candid moments between you and your new husband enjoying the best day of your lives, then there’s something wrong with them.

To avoid this possibility, ask to see not only a photographer’s best shots, but also their best candid shots. This will speak volumes about the kind of photos they take and the relationship they build with the couple throughout the shoot.

“We’ve hired a photographer, everybody else relax”

With mobile phones reaching saturation-point, everybody is a photographer these days. I’ve heard some even say after a wedding that they got better photos than the photographer did. Doubtful.

Mobile phones ruin concerts, they ruin celebrity meet and greets and they sure as hell ruin weddings. There is nothing worse than the wedding video showing the bride walking down the aisle with all her family and friends HOLDING UP THEIR PHONES! It’s pretty hard for a photographer to get a nice pic of you both with this going on.

So our advice is to spend $10 on a sign at the entrance to the wedding ceremony that politely tells everybody that mobile phone photos won’t be necessary. Blame the photographer and say that he has explicitly asked for no mobile phones to be used until the reception.