Wedding Photography Tips

Wedding photography is – let’s face it – traditionally boring.  Who, with the exception of the bride and the bride’s mum, wants to see 200 snaps of family and friends looking hot and awkward in hired suits or little Johnny smearing himself with wedding cake in his ghastly pageboy outfit?  A wedding, after all, is a living monument to life and love.  Perhaps (dare we say it?) wedding photography could, or should, be a little... freer?  To this end, a selection of wedding photography tips for the unpaid photographer.

The Alpha and Omega of all wedding photography tips:  don’t get too drunk.  Anyone who wants to take decent shots at a wedding needs to be sober enough to pick and choose the snaps they are taking.  Even digital photography loses its charm when you’ve taken 800 out of focus pictures of a bridesmaid’s cleavage.  Also:  make sure everyone else is drunk enough, or at least relaxed enough, to be comfortable.  Wedding photography tips 101 – taking pictures at a wedding is basic portrait photography, and in basic portrait photography the first thing you learn is to relax your subject so they forget you are holding a camera.

Which leads us nicely to the next in our list of wedding photography tips.  Unless you really, really have to show off – use a small camera.  These days, people are so used to having camera phones or pocket digital cameras around that they don’t think anything of them.  By contrast, the snout like lenses of SLR cameras seem huge and intrusive – so, wedding photography tips number 2, don’t use an obtrusive camera unless you really have to.  Around little cameras, people of all ages act naturally.

Number 3:  no list of wedding photography tips would be complete without this one – don’t try and take pictures that look like the stuff you see in professional wedding portfolios.  That’s why the happy couple have hired a wedding photographer.  The mission of the amateur is to come away with a different story of the same event – the people story, all the human bits and bobs that the pros tend to miss.  Unless, of course, you count lining everyone up under a tree as the human side of a wedding.