Approach to Weddings

My typical approach to photographing a wedding involves arriving several hours before the ceremony starts. The trend towards true photojournalistic coverage of a wedding may be catching on, but I still love to do formal portraits of the bride and groom. It's classic portraiture and the few times a bride has said they don't want it, they've always regretted it. The groom and his party usually go first, about 2 hours before the ceremony, we do several poses, including a few of just the groom and best man, then we do a large number of groom only poses. We usually can finish 100 to 200 exposures in about 30 minutes.

After that, the groom goes and hides and the bride arrives about an hour and a half before the ceremony. We spent 30 minutes or so on fun bridesmaid poses, and get a few of the maid of honor and the bride. Then we spend 30 minutes getting lots of shots of the bride, her hair, her train, her flowers, and any other detail that needs to be captured. We do about 200-300 exposures in about an hour leaving 30 minutes before the ceremony starts.

The ceremony is captured unobtrusively, I don't use flash, I don't go to the front of the church. I may walk down the middle aisle a few steps, but most shots will be from the balcony and from the back row of the church. Since flash is not used, slow shutter speeds will be required and that means a tripod. There is no good way to move a large tripod around a church during a wedding, so I don't do it.

After the ceremony, formals for both sides are taken. We start with the largest parties first. Poses with grandparents are done, then siblings, then parents, then just the wedding party. This allows us to release people to the reception fast instead of making them sit around watching portraits being taken. Finally it's just the bride and groom, we spend 15-20 minutes getting semi-posed portraits of the bride and groom interacting as husband and wife for the first time.

When we arrive at the reception it's back to photojournalism. I capture the events of the evening as they unfold. I keep my eyes open looking for interesting exchanges between guests and the wedding party, and I document the details of the room.

After all of this I generally deliver between 800 and 1000 images to the bride and groom.