What's your personal view of wedding photography?

[jason hinds - columbus, oh]

So I just got my new edition of American Photo in the mail, and they have a

great article titled "State of the Art", which highlights the top ten wedding

photographers in the world (according to them). Pretty good read if you

haven't seen it yet.

 

However, it was the first paragraph that really got me thinking. I

quote..."Wedding photographers used to get no respect, either from customers

or from pros. It's only recently that they've been widely recognized for

their multifaceted talent..."

 

It goes on to talk about how the wedding industry, specifically photography,

has changed as of late, and that photographers today are much more artists

than just "photographers". What do you think? Do you view yourself and/or

wedding photography as an art? Those of you that have been around for a

while, can you tell an obvious difference in the demands of clients? Have you

changed your style to meet these changing demands?

 

Just curious to see how other people felt about this topic. Personally, I

feel wedding photography allows the photographer to be very artistic, and

today's flavor is far removed from the old days of standard posed shots and

formal photo albums.

[edsel_adams]

I feel the opposite is true. Wedding photographers used to have skills and talent in order to even to enter the industry. Now days, brides think that a pile of snap shots is high art, so anyone can be a master wedding photographer, go figure.

 

 

Life sometimes goes backwards. People announce themselves as pros first, and then try to learn how. When someone in here is asking a basic photography question, and they are shooting weddings for money, something is wrong. They should be developing theories on their own, and explaining their approach to us. Not asking how to shoot in the dark, the light , the where ever.

[nancy s.]

I recall, when I was in college, a young man who had decided to join his Father in learning wedding photography. I also recall him saying that it really was not art (this was in 1977) and he had decided to do it because he could learn it and it would make him enough money so that he could pursue his first love.. training search and rescue dogs!

 

He also said that it would take him about as long as a college degree to reach the stage where he could do this proficiently to make enough money to live on etc.

 

I am not sure wedding photography is really art. I can see where there are some artisitic shots in any/every wedding and I believe that should be part of the pursuit. However, there are some basic shots that are the core to every wedding and are repetitious enough to not be considered an art form (not much originality) and these shots form the bulk of most wedding albums. They are also the shots that are most requested for finished albums and reprints (over the mantel stuff).

 

So, yes, wedding photography can be artistic. Most of it is not.

 

I think the greater problem in wedding photography today is the influx of folks who think they can charge money based on a shallow knowledge base (shallow knowledge in how light behaves and how it is captured on either digital or film media).

 

I believe that just as a fine artist needs to understand light and how to mix paints to make a painting, a photographer in ANY pursuit needs to understand their equipment, flash, capture media and its limitations, and light before they can worry about shooting for money. Beyond that, basic knowledge of posing and composition are essential. At this point, with these tools, they are ready to shoot weddings....

 

and, if they are good, do so with artistry.

[stephen dohring]

I like Nancy's word Artistry and your word Artistic those are good words. Someone like Peter Max or dead master painters for example to me are true "Artists" I think photographers are Creative and Artistic - We capture people in a certain way or place them in a certain way. then manipulate a digital image with a creative artistic flare, but creating something from nothing ... a quality sculpture or painting is real Art to me. In everything there is natural ability - you can find people who know the exact mathmatical equations for how light rays are captured by a CCD or film and someonce who doesn't know the relationship between shutter and arpeture and latter person may have more natural artistic ability in compostion. I like the PJ style, I think it takes talent to capture special moments and intelligence to understand how to operate your camera and understand light to get a quality image. You have to have some of this "artistic ability" in your genetic makeup to be considered highly creative or artistic and then it can be developed and improved even further. Like art or sports you just can't work you ass of and be professional baseball player or copy the Mona Lisa to perfection. Talent is there or it isn't. How many times are you told "You must have a really good camera" or after seeing your shots they say "Oh I want a camera like yours" (shrug) No one said to Leonardo "I gotta get a brush like that" Educated people get it. Structured portraits can be learned, put people here, light it like this, set the camera to this. Fromulas can be followed without much variation then it is a craft like learning how to be a skilled tradeperson. Look at Yervant and Joe Buissink and you can see they have been born with something special.

[al_kaplan1]

Nancy said it all. In the end the choice will be mostly pictures of smiling happy people with a few artsy shots scattered in amongst them. As for skills, look at how many questions we see here about making the fancy auto-focus auto-exposure DSLR behave like a good puppy and focus where we want it to, instead of the piece of background between the two happy people (and then there's "focus creep"), and so many shooters can't figure out why a bride in white with a groom in black creates so many exposure problems depending on how much white or black is being metered. Somebody then carefully explains a work-around to get the automation to behave...

 

I also think that too much attention is given to the top guns in the business. Nobody stops to consider that you can't produce a ten thousand dollar wedding album when the budget is a fraction of that, and is it worth spending twenty hours tweaking the color and composition of a thousand images? The sheer number of brides who are looking for a friend to shoot their wedding speaks volumes about where most of the market really is, and it doesn't include a gourmet dinner at a country club reception with a live 4 piece band.

[jason_carreira]

I think people have a misunderstanding of what fine art photography is. I got my BFA from a program that's very focused on the art side more than the commercial side. I don't know a lot of the technical stuff that you pros know and never had nice fancy equipment to use.

 

If pro photogs looked at fine art photography, you'd probably think "what a crappy image! It needs more contrast, the light isn't right over here, it just looks like any old snapshot!" Fine art photography these days is much more about the ideas behind the images than the technical process of capturing and rendering the images. For every fine art photographer taking pictures with a large format camera, there's at least one using disposable cameras. Often they look like crappy family snapshots or some other no-no image, but if you take them together, they're expressing something deeper.

 

Wedding photography is a craft. It's got its artistic side, and it's got its tedious mechanical side, but I think you're confusing the issue by comparing it to fine art. A B&G would probably not be happy getting a fine-art photogs take on their wedding ;)

[jennifer_nichols]

O.K., you can debate the age old question, "What is art?" all day long. That being said, I believe that wedding photography absolutely has the potential to be "artistic," and I think there is a demand for images that capture true emotion and provide a new perspective, now more than ever before in wedding photography.

 

Like Jason, I received my BFA with emphasis in "fine art" photography. He's right that comparing wedding photography to "fine art" is not accurate in that with fine art, you have an pre-conceived message or idea that you're trying to convey to the audience through your images. But I don't think the question was about fine art. I will say that in art school, wedding photography was never discussed as a potential way to make a living doing what you love. It was looked upon as a "lesser art" and a compromise. And now that I have discovered how gratifying and challenging wedding photography can be, I kinda resent not being presented with that possibility in college.

 

As far as the notion that the quality and skill of wedding photography has gone downhill, where are these people looking? I have never before seen such amazing, artistic wedding photography as I'm discovering now, and it's so inspirational. Look around people! You might find some inspiration to get your creative juices flowing again. Take a look at these sites below. I don't recall seeing anything quite like this in the genre of wedding photography back in the 80's and 90's. And you're telling me that wedding photography has gone downhill. I'm so tired of hearing this.

 

Here's a link to blogs of some of my fav photogs:

 

http://www.theblogisfound.com/

 

http://mooreblog.wordpress.com/page/2/

 

http://stacyandmary.typepad.com/blog/

 

http://www.boutwellstudio.com/blog/

 

http://bybobbi.blogspot.com/

 

And there will always be "budget brides," because frankly, not everyone has unlimited $$ to hire the best photographers out there. That doesn't mean that they have cheap taste and I don't think this is an indication of where the market is.

 

I'm thrilled that there is such a huge demand for artistic wedding photography that captures real emotion. As photographers, we should all celebrate the fact that wedding photography has changed for the better and is open to our own creative interpretation, and not just cheesy, stiff posed shots that exude 0 emotion or feeling. Yippee!

[matt_needham]

Manuel Alvarez Bravo said it much more succinctly than I could...

 

"The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics."

[picturesque]

My personal view of wedding photography is that it is first and foremost a product which is sold to a client. Therefore, the client's wishes shape the way I produce that product for that client. Wedding photography can at times be both artistic and successful at fulfilling the client's needs, but every shot is not going to be "art" since much of wedding photography is somewhat mundane--no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape the fact that certain repetitive and ordinary shots need to be taken. So I do my best to be sure that those reptitive and ordinary shots are technically and compositionally the highest quality that I can produce. I am sure there are clients who don't care at all about whether those shots are taken, but I have so far not run across any.

 

For instance, that shot of the bride and father walking down the aisle... Now I have seen severely motion blurred shots of this activity being passed off as art. Maybe it is, and maybe new ways of showing this shot necessitate obliterating the features of the bride's face, but if so, I would bet the bride will not be happy, no matter how much she might have said that she loves PJ or fine art photography (no offense to fine art photographers). She is paying a wedding photographer, after all, to produce images of her wedding day which will serve as mementos and as family history to be passed on to coming generations. Does she want to see her expression (and dad's expression) and details of the moment clearly? You bet. And shots taken in the duty of PJ to tell a story are not all going to be art. They are merely serving as transitional images between activities, or place setting images, such as detail shots.

 

On the other hand, I have seen great examples of true PJ moments taken during a wedding that I would call art. It happens sometimes but not all the time, every shot. Some photographers have higher success ratios than others for spotting and getting those true PJ moments. But I bet not every shot they take is going to be art.

 

There is also the issue of whether a posed shot can be artisitic. I think it can. I disagree with the premise that any posed shot is bad, static, old-fashioned, and boring. Well done posing is an art in itself.

 

I have been around for a while, and I have seen trends come and go. I find that what clients demand is actually mostly shaped by what they see in wedding magazines (mass media) and by what wedding photographers happen to be "pushing" at the time. I have changed my style to bring my shooting in line with what is selling at the time--one has to in order to survive. In that sense, I am quite practical, I guess. I would call myself a wedding photographer, not a wedding artist so I probably won't be featured in one of those top ten lists anytime soon.

 

Plus, art really is in the eye of the beholder, so are those top photographers artists in the eyes of their fellow photographers, their clients, other people buying wedding photography who can't afford them, or the magazine editors who write about them?

[al_kaplan1]

Those magazine editors have two goals in mind when choosing pictures and articles. One is selling magazines. The other is producing something that will attract advertisers. Great art has nothing to do with either goal.

[kimberly_smith___anchorage]

Hmm...I have to disagree with what the editor said in the first paragraph. Today I've seen the "pro" get respect, and those that didn't. With anything, it's usually the people that aspire to and demand respect that get it.<BR><BR>

What is art? Good question. To me art is something that is not spontaneous and happened from good luck. Art takes a lot of time and experience with a little talent thrown in.<BR><BR>

Lately it seems that the public, thanks to the media, has now been attuned to fake beauty. Go to www.campaignforrealbeauty.com and click on the evolution film to see what I mean. No wonder the mass of photographers are running to digital and retouching for days in photoshop!<BR><BR>

Standard posed shots. What is standard about posed shots? Is it the lighting, the "posed" part of it, a group, what? I would be offended if I hired a "pro" and all I got was a stack of 1000 cropped, digitized (because the lighting was wrong), crooked horizons, and blurry shots. Yep, put them all together with fancy borders, cute and elegant backgrounds and bind them in a magazine style book and they tell a story.<BR><BR>

So now we have inkjet comic books instead of wall portraits. Doesn't sound like it's advancing to me. How many people do scrapbooking for a hobby? That is why I'm running the opposite direction.<BR><BR>

So the bottom line to me is, will the result be fine enough to be passed down two generations and increase in value?<BR>

What percentage of my images could stand on their own? I am constantly working to increase that percentage.<BR><BR>

[conraderb]

as far as respect - my impression is that a lot of photographers now don't get much b/c there there are a lot of professional photographers who are professionals in a technical sense of making $$ for their photography, but they just aren't good. too many 'f8 and 1/125th of a second with direct flash all day long, baby!' photographers out there who obviously make good money and obviously don't read about photography (which is why most of them never find photo.net).

 

the other observation relates to the wedding service field in general - wedding service providers are stereotyped as shallow, insincere people who do lousy work and take no ownership or pride what they deliver.

 

I find that maybe 1/3rd of all the people I come across doing weddings belong in this category, and it scares me and ticks me off because people who do lousy work and don't take ownership of it seem to be the people who do weddings not because they have good people skills or love weddings, but because they are into the money, and nothing else.

 

I don't like working with those people :-(

 

a call to arms! take ownership of your work, people! be proud to be a good photographer if you are one! If you are f8 and 1/125th all day long with direct flash, then as an official photo.net snob, I disown you :-)

[picturesque]

Kimberly and Conrad--by your responses, I think you misunderstand the line re respect. In my opinion, the line means to say wedding photographers as a whole, not inidividual or certain types of wedding photographers. When I was in photo school a long time ago, wedding photography and wedding photographers in general were looked down upon as a lesser form of photographer and photography--if you couldn't cut it as a "fill in the blank" photographer, you could always shoot weddings, was the opinion. However, I also noticed that wedding photographers seemed to gain more respect when those "fill in the blank" photographers started losing work (for economic and technical reasons) and turned to wedding photography to survive :^)

 

Anyway, I disagree that wedding photographers used to get no respect from customers. I think we get less respect from customers now, due to the gradual and overall devaluing of wedding photography (for whatever reasons you want to assign, be it the digital revolution, flood of newcomers, economy, what have you).

 

And Conrad--the fact that some photographers haven't changed their shooting methods doesn't mean there wasn't an initial good reason to use f8 and 1/125th with direct flash all day. That was a pretty good combo for medium format gear (for general DOF) with slower, older films and lenses. And flash wasn't so harsh with the bigger reflectors used on bigger flashes back then. Plus flash modifiers were unheard of in event work due to the slow films. As for using the same setting all day long--it is, and still is--a pretty good tool to use the film's latitude to enable you to get the shot rather than worry about minor exposure variations killing your shot like you have to now with digital. Not adapting to what is available to you now is bad, I agree, but that doesn't mean f8 and 1/125th is bad, bad, bad...

[bruce_rubenstein___nyc]

One thing is for sure, and it's that the range of skill of wedding photographers has never been wider. For a number of reasons, a large number of very good commercial photographers entered the field around ten years ago. Their work far exceeds that of the typical wedding photographer from 25 years ago. I also know of real photojournalists who have moved into wedding photography. One of them, in the DC area, won a Pulitzer Prize.

[fotografz]

A camera in the hands of an artist produces art. In the hands of a craftsman, it's a craft.

 

Tools, methods and applications are not the defining elements of what is art, and what is

not.

 

The idea that every wedding image can't be art doesn't lessen the potential to produce art

at a wedding. Even the great artists did the mundane ... they just painted over it.

 

Jasper Johns distroyed decades of work to assure only his best was ever seen. We call it

editing ... which in itself is an art.

 

Call it what you will, it is what you make of it, not what others say of it.

[tim_hinchliffe]

I cannot believe I had to read so far down the page before the phrase "people skills" appeared. I've lost count of the number of photographers I've met that were so damn proud of their kit, their technical knowledge, their p/p wizardry, the whole deal, and yet look at their results and it is plain to see that the vital thing missing is any kind of rapport at all with the actual living people they are supposed to be working for. And a lot of this thread has had the attitude that we're all doing still life shots of subjects that just happen to be breathing.

 

There is no other area of photography, and I would hesitantly include Portrait, where the quality of your relationship with the subjects matters quite as much as with Wedding Photography. Look at it from their point of view for a second. They're getting married; it's their big day, not mine. They don't give a rat's behind whether I'm feeling artistically fulfilled or not; they're not impressed with my 5D with L glass on the front. To them, I'm there to record the day's events, leave them with something to look at to remind them, and not get in the way.

 

I'm proud that most of the people I've shot for have complimented me on the fact that they've stayed relaxed about the whole deal. What too many photographers forget is that most civilians look on having their picture taken with the same enthusiasm as they approach root canal work, wedding day or not, and being able to get past that is every bit as important as your technical ability. I've been married ten years now, and I still haven't forgiven the little twerp that shot my wedding for being a pain in the neck. The pictures were technically fine, he knew his trade, but without the rapport, they're lifeless.

 

 

I sometimes work with a guy whose kit costs about the same as my house, we did a wedding with a good looking bride, and in every shot she's smiling to beat the band, and in every shot, the smile looks like it was glued on, as an afterthought. She hates him; wishes he'd go away. In that situation, what the hell difference does it make how good a photographer he is ? Totally lifeless, technically perfect.

 

 

I'm not the most technically proficient photographer around, and my kit didn't bankrupt me, but every recommendation I get is because they didn't mind having me around. People will say that they've had me recommended to them, but to be really honest here, they talk as much about the way I handled things as they do about how good the shots were.

 

 

Oh yeah, and I can be artistic when called upon .

[conraderb]

Nadine - you are correct that I took 'respect' my own way.

 

>And Conrad--the fact that some photographers haven't changed their >shooting methods doesn't mean there wasn't an initial good reason to >use f8 and 1/125th with direct flash all day.

 

This is true, and it is a fine way to shoot when conditions call for it. In this case, the people who I'm referring to are the ones who do nothing else with their D2x and a nice speedlight, in a well-lit room with white ceilings, and they insist on using direct flash. So sad :-)

 

Tim - well said. People skills are a huge part of this work unless you are paparazzi shooting the wedding. When people ask, I tell them that at least 40% of being a good wedding photography is being friendly and helpful. I make a point of always speaking with the parents of my (younger) clients at some point in the reception to make sure that they can share any photography requests they had, and I know they appreciate it.

[kevin m.]

"I cannot believe I had to read so far down the page before the phrase "people skills"

appeared. I've lost count of the number of photographers I've met that were so damn proud

of their kit, their technical knowledge, their p/p wizardry, the whole deal, and yet look at

their results and it is plain to see that the vital thing missing is any kind of rapport at all with

the actual living people they are supposed to be working for. "

 

This is the best post I've read on this forum in over a year.

[picturesque]

I agree with Tim's post, but I'm not sure how this answers the questions asked. Seems to me, good people skills can be present or absent in a photographer regardless of the art quotient in the resulting set of images. Tim, are you saying wedding photographers can't be artists or wedding photography isn't art because the photography needs be subservient to the client's goals...or what?

[al_kaplan1]

I don't see how it's possible to photograph people without having good people skills.

[fotografz]

Oh, I think some have more human insight, or an unspoken connection with the subject

than others, and it can show up in the images.

 

The aspect of connecting is more one of intuitive observation, which of course can be an

art also, but independent of style. You can shoot traditional posed shots and connect with

the subject just as in good portrait work... or you can be very expressive with technique

and still connect.

 

Tim's response may raise hackles, because it assumes something he shouldn't have

assumed ... that the responders here somehow don't connect with their subjects .. and he

does.

 

Can't speak on behalf of others, but I can for myself ... I have no problem putting my

subjects at ease, they almost always comment on how they didn't even know I was there.

And I am very artistic with every shot I can manage. They are not mutually exclusive

concepts ... unless you make them so.

 

BTW, I am very good technically, have a huge, expensive kit, and am pretty good at PS ...

but that doesn't stop me from "feeling" my subjects. I also strive to be artistically fullfilled

because it drives me to improve the expression of what the people around me are

experiencing and feeling ... to be more creative , intuitive, observant, to make better

images than I did on the last wedding ... my clients see that, want that, and they're willing

to pay me for just that.

[tim_hinchliffe]

Sorry about raising hackles; not my intention. I guess my main problem was the idea of debating functionality versus Art in wedding photography without any reference to the actual subjects. Anyway, without the occasional broad generalisation, and the odd inaccurate assumption, nobody would ever post anything, I guess.

 

Anyway, to address the question that was actually asked, the important thing that strikes me is that there are a heck of a lot of wedding photographers out there.

 

Way back when, I think people were much more likely to just pick the one who lived nearest; there wasn't a great deal to choose between them, since there wasn't a great deal of originality in the pictures. Look at my mother's wedding next to my aunts' and swap the heads around, no one would ever know.

 

 

Nowadays, if you want work, you need something to make your stuff stand out from the crowd, so it behooves the modern wedding photographer to bring his own personality or artistic sensibilities into the mix. ( or people skills, possibly. ) ( Sorry. )

 

 

If I intend to charge serious money, I better be offering something that the dreaded "friend-of-the-family" can't provide; and expensive kit and Olympic-standard Adobe-osity aren't going to do it on their own.

 

 

One other factor no one has mentioned is possibly more important than any other; Time. I sometimes look at the stunning shots some guys have on their homepage or in their portfolio, and I think to myself that I could probably do something similar, if only the mean old B&G would let me have a couple of hours of their Wedding Day to do it in. I get twenty minutes, with some shuffling of feet, and lots of wistful looking towards the Bar. Be as artistic as you can; just don't take too long over it.

 

 

That's why I really believe a lot of photographic skill is actually instinctive. Because instinctive is all you have time for.

[picturesque]

My hackles aren't raised...I was merely confused because while you make a good point, Tim, it seemed to be outside the scope of the questions asked. I have seen talented, artistic photographers who are like dead fish when it comes to handling people. I have seen mediocre photographers who rake in the dollars and are very popular because they can handle people well.

 

One thing--one can't assume that just because the albums from years ago are all the same (read "Boooring!") doesn't mean the photographer didn't actually shoot other, more interesting images that weren't picked for the album. Then, as today, the boring stuff (posed family shots) gets into the albums, no matter what. Only in the past, more so, because everything was sold by the print and there was a finite amount of space in your typical album. Today, you can put more images into magazine style albums and because customers don't have to buy by the print (mostly), some of the more interesting shots may get into the album too. I bet if you were constrained by your budget and sheer album space capacity, you'd end up with the boring family shots with maybe not much room for other stuff too. I worked as an apprentice for a wedding and portrait photographer when I was in high school and some of his creative work never made it into the albums.