Wedding Photography

Remember when wedding photography involved a man in a portable tent trying to get 300 people to stand still long enough to say “cheese”?  When the resulting album cost thousands of pounds and only contained professionally-posed shots of awkward-looking relations in dated suits?

In the last 10 years, digital wedding photography has become widely available to everyone, regardless of background, budget, religion or type of service.  Democratic digital wedding photography is facilitated by mobile phones, whose internal cameras have an increasing megapixel quota and quality; by the easy availability of affordable compact digital cameras; and by the online locations where the photographs can be uploaded, stored and shared.

Professional wedding photography is almost exclusively digital, too – it’s also, practically without fail, no different to the images taken by the tent-wielding shutterbug of yesteryear.  A shame when one considers the low cost of quality memory cards, for even the highest of high-end digital SLRs.  Affordable memory ought to allow a wedding photographer to take some truly unique images of the memorable day as well as the more standard ones.  It seems that the art of traditional wedding photography, with the notable exception of a few sharp-thinking individuals, is as staid as it ever was:  just in more vivid colours and with a quicker turnaround.

No – where digitisation has really turned wedding photography into an art is with the easy upload and hosting facilities that let people with “normal” digital cameras share their own versions of the extraordinary day.  Ingenious sites like Flickr (who pioneered online digital image hosting at the turn of the century) paved the way for a glut of web pages with enhanced “shareability”. 

Facebook is a prime example, allowing users to comment easily on images arranged in albums – a system that makes the experience of the images as much a part of the art as the images themselves.  Wedding photography is catered for in a similar fashion by dedicated photo hosting sites like Shoebox360, a digital image host that lets members upload unlimited numbers of pictures into “shoeboxes”, which (and here’s the artistic bit) can be filled by guest’s pictures as well.  Allowing guests to add pictures makes the wedding photography experience into a shared artistic response:  people can see different viewpoints of the same thing, recorded in different ways by different people. 

The wedding photography showcased on sites like Shoebox has a vibrancy lacking from “normal” commemorative albums:  it reminds the viewer that days, and events, are created by their attendees as well as their “official” photographer.  In the fast-moving, Twitter-filled world we all live in, this new wedding photography is capable of providing digital “comment” on a red-letter day:  a timely reminder of the emotional human nature of events often captured only by posed professional media.