A little note about the “pinit” buttons on the bottom of our posts, please keep using them. Its been lovely to see that people have been sharing our work. We don’t produce work just to keep it hidden, so thank you everyone for a fantastic response to the new feature on the blog.

I know they are all just labels and it’s the pictures that count, well the pictures and how we go about making them.

It was only 10 or 20 years ago that photographers started labeling their approach, before that we were all just wedding photographers. Some of us at the end of the eighties gave the world of wedding photography a well-needed kick in the rear. We changed the way wedding photographers worked. We made some others sit up and think about the way they went about recording weddings. Not all wedding photographers then or those that arrived later became documentary wedding photographers but many of them took a step back and had a good look at their practices.

See, back then we didn’t make the decision to work the way we do now for stylistic reasons, we went down the route we did because we heard what guests, Vicars, registrars, venue managers and most of all our customers had to say about the way most wedding photographers worked. In those days wedding photographers took control of the wedding. I was trained that way; I began photographing weddings in 1976. We would stop, create, recreate moments and set the pace for everything that happened on the wedding day. We would hold the Bride at the car, with the Vicar and the Bridesmaids waiting at the Church door, we would pose the Bride and her Farther two or three times on the path to the door. The Vicar would check his watch and grumpily ask that we finish and whisk the party into the Church.

After the ceremony the guests would wait impatiently while the Photographer took the Bride and Groom away for sometimes an hour or so of “romantic portraits” and then there were the endless groups. In those days weddings were more like photo shoots.

Although, as I said it wasn’t a stylistic decision we did look for reference when we began our revolution. I had been very influenced by the pictures I saw in the Time Life series of photography books I collected as a student. The images used in those books were taken from the archives of “Life” magazine; they were made during the heyday of photojournalism, at a time before TV made it’s way into every home. The images were designed to be used in sequence and series and laid out by picture editors and designers to tell stories, often the only words were the title and extended captions, the pictures carried the narrative. Those photographers of “Life” magazine and others like “Stern” in Germany, “Paris Match” in France and “Picture Post” in the UK and from the agencies like “Magnum Photos” were Photojournalists, they produced a “photo reportage”.

Photojournalists get the story out, they make a photo reportage, they use whatever techniques are available to them including image pick ups, collecting existing pictures to use in the report. They are supposed to be impartial; they show it the way they see it, warts and all. Those photojournalists are sometimes documentarists as well, they document history.

Documentary photographers will often stay with a story, sometimes for years to record how it develops; there is more depth than mere reportage. Sometimes, and in particular when a documentary photographer has worked with a subject for a long time empathy evolves that makes impartiality more difficult.

A lot of my fellow Documentary wedding photographers cite war photographers among their influences. I know what they mean. War photographers like Don McCullin and Larry Burrows are not just great at capturing the moment, they tell moving stories as well. It would be a highly desensitised viewer who could derive pleasure, beyond the surface, from any war photograph. It’s a long stretch for “non photographers” to see beauty in war.  Those that cite war photography as influence must be referring to the way those photographers construct images, the shapes within the four edges of a 2 dimensional frame. The way that construction can lead to a meaning that transcends the subject.

As wedding photographers, we are concerned with telling a story, one that is truthful and has integrity, but we don’t want to tell it warts and all. I can honestly say we don’t see many warts at weddings anyway. Our wedding stories, while retaining integrity, are empathetic, we believe compassionate. We are charged with the responsibility of making an in depth document of one of the most special days of any couple’s lives. We seek out the beauty in our subjects, we don’t contrive it but we choose our moments.

We do that all without interference, we hold dear our original objective to make the best possible record of your wedding day without influencing, holding up or controlling in any way.

Our influences are also documentary photographers but artists too like Elliott Erwitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Ralph Gibson, photographers who see the beauty in humanity not just the misery.

We are documentary wedding photographers.

The word is from the Greek, Thanks to Sir John Hercshel, “photo” meaning light and “graphy” meaning drawing or writing. As photographers, we practice the art of writing with light.

Clearly in photography, light is everything, and as observational wedding photographers we are principally interested in the existing light. It makes sense; we want to document a wedding day in a way that will remind the participants of how it was. There’s little point in arranging dramatic lighting set ups using artificial sources. So we spend a lot of time at a wedding looking for and positioning ourselves to make the most of the available light.

When we trained as photographers we learned all of the principles of studio lighting. We understood about face shapes and bone structure, we learned all about Broad and Narrow lighting, Rim lighting, Rembrandt lighting and when to use them.

In a studio, we select lights and modifiers and position light sources, reflectors, gobos and scrims to achieve those arrangements that work best for the subject and what it is we want to say.

We also learned about densitometry and how it relates to sensitometry and how that all matters when we are making photographs. As artisans we also understand how we can apply or ignore the technical rules of sensitometry for aesthetic effect.

We know that we can use the power of light and shade to tell stories; we understand how emotive light or its absence can be to a viewer of our images. In order to practice what we do we have to have a thorough understanding of light and sensitometry. We have to know what will happen when we position the spot of our light meter in any given part of the scene we are photographing. We have to understand the direction of light, the reflecting, absorbing or transmitting qualities of certain materials and colours and we need to remember all that stuff we learnt in the studio.

As I said, as documentary wedding photographers we are using the existing light so when we compose a picture we apply the foundation of our knowledge to relay a story, while not influencing the scene beyond finding our own position and choosing the moment.

I have nothing to add to Tori and David’s brilliant thank you card, we’re glad you are so happy. ]]> http://steventaylorphotography.co.uk/index.php/great-thank-you-card/feed/ 0 http://steventaylorphotography.co.uk/index.php/what-makes-a-documentary-wedding-photograph-great/ http://steventaylorphotography.co.uk/index.php/what-makes-a-documentary-wedding-photograph-great/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:02:45 +0000 steve http://steventaylorphotography.co.uk/?p=2649 NOTE: the images in this feed have been downsized or removed for copyright reasons. To see them in their unmodified state, please view the original post by clicking here.

Us documentary wedding photographers don’t just do it for a job you know. It’s almost an obsession we have. So when we’re not shooting pictures or making the best of them in the processing or designing albums and making prints, we’re reading about what we do and talking to other like minded obsessives. We do talk face to face and on the phone but we also talk through Twitter, Facebook and on Forums.

At the weekend one of our colleagues posed a hypothetical question to one of the forums, he asked. “What makes a documentary wedding photograph great?”

He knows the answer but it made for an interesting discussion I thought my opinion on it might be of interest to some others so here goes:

Unlike other more contrived wedding photography, reportage wedding photography is rarely about a single image. However I will try to answer the question as it was asked, I might have to mention context though.

…Well, as always, in my opinion.

The key difference between a great documentary image and any grabbed candid is purpose. The image should have a reason for its existence. We often edit out pictures because they no longer have a reason to exist. If the image doesn’t communicate it’s a waste of “film?”.

“…Sometimes there is a unique picture whose composition posses such vigour and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture is a whole story in itself. This is rare…” 

Henri Cartier-Bresson 

As HCB says great documentary photography is rarely about the single image.

Our profession has traditionally had standards set by photographic awarding bodies. These organisations set their standards in the tradition of the Photographic society (now the RPS) and the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring (now the London Salon), the Victorian formalisation of our craft/art. Those two, in turn borrowed from painting, Fibonacci and all that. So we are often judged on a single image. Those organisations don’t know how to judge a documentary image because a good documentary image is greater than the sum of its parts but only in the context of other images.

While classical wedding photography owes much to the tradition of painting what we do is more akin to literature, film and theatre. Very difficult to sum it all up in one image. As practitioners we recognise single great documentary images because we understand the events the image portrays and are aware of the context by experience. Fortunately so do most people that have ever have been to a wedding.

Great documentary wedding photography is about communicating emotion.

It is the light and shade that lets the integrity of a documentary approach shine through.

On any given wedding day there are a full range of emotions on display and I reckon we include as many images of crying Mums as we do of laughing Grooms.

On the other hand we avoid the unflattering angles and expressions like the plague. It’s all in the timing. A good wedding portraitist (that’s what I’ll call a wedding photographer who contrives pictures) will pose the subject in the best light, they will move and tweak to get the body language right, they’ll tease the expression, make tiny adjustments to the fabrics all with the ultimate aim of producing an image that any Bride or Groom will be happy to hang on their wall.

True Reportage wedding photographers, on the other hand, watch, wait and position themselves until the subject moves into the light, positions herself, sometimes just for a tiny fraction of a second, so that the body language says (writing this on Valentines day) “I love you.” If that happens in dramatic or flattering light and the expression says the same as the body language and the fabric hangs as it was designed to and the whole thing sits as a pleasing arrangement of tones and/or colours within the 4 edges of the frame, that’s a special documentary image.

Perfect contrived wedding photographs are simply helping what will occur naturally. Wedding Photojournalists on the other hand have to be alert to what is going to happen.

What we do is not easy to do well, that’s why there are far more doing it the other way.

That all brings us seamlessly to the ultimate definition of a great documentary wedding photograph, integrity.

Ok, bit early I know, but if we don’t do it now we will be too busy by the time the actual spring time arrives. Anyway, it’s more of a virtual spring clean, we’re not the best at getting up to our elbows in Ajax in the real world. I’m talking about right here, this blog and web site, we’re trying to make this place all spick and span.

The more observant followers of this blog, I’m counting all you documentary wedding photographers in that statement, will have noticed that last weekend we had a spruce up of the fonts, our logo and colour scheme, well it’s going to be a big project, this week we did a little more. Some of the improvements were quite subtle. Did you see we’ve changed that slide show at the top of each page? We’ve made it so that the logo appears between each image and it stops when you get to the last image. We thought that it would be less distracting when you are reading other pages or looking at other slideshows. We’ve also changed some of the page buttons to make them a little less severe sounding. We are also working on some more copy for the about us and approach pages, in fact we’ll combine those into one page and put the emphasis on the images…

…And here’s the big one. We have selected around 300 images from the last two years weddings that we are working on with our new look processing, all of our work this year will be processed this way. We will eventually, probably in the next couple of weeks, replace the existing portfolio with a selection from the new one, of course we’ll continue to update with new material as we make it.

I know non photographers may not pick up some of the subtle changes we are making to the way we process but we like to make these changes to keep up with the times. It is led by fashion but we do dilute the effect so that it doesn’t look dated once the fashion has passed. We like to retain the integrity of what we do while making the best of the images that are current but real.

Here are just few to get a feel for what we are up to, I hope you like them.

A couple of weeks ago we had a meeting with a couple who had come to talk about booking us for their wedding photography. They knew all about our unobtrusive documentary wedding photography. They knew we could also make some beautiful portraits of them soon after they were married and that unlike lots of other photographers we would do that without taking too much time out of their day, they even assumed that as experienced wedding photographers we wouldn’t have any problem organising some family groups.

Then they asked, “do you photograph all of the little details and themes of the day, because you know all of the new photographers around make a really big thing of that and it is very important to us that they are all recorded?”

Well at first we were suprised they asked, we’ve always photographed the details and themes, we get that it is really important. Then we had a look at some of the newer photographers around and sure enough their sites are full of details.

See we’ve always done it but thought it was such an obvious and easy part of the wedding photographer‘s duty that we didn’t see the importance of showing them on our site. We’ve always emphasised how we capture the mood and feel for every wedding we document and how we find the personality of the main protagonists and the guests. We’ve never shown lots of details because we assumed everyone would know we did them, our mistake.

So, to try to make up for the last 36 years of not having details in our portfolio here are a few to be going on with.

A couple of pre wedding shoots on frosty mornings over the last week or two.

We are documenting Rebecca and Jeff’s wedding on 3rd March in Chester. Rebecca is Rachel’s sister. We photographed Rachel and Mark’s wedding at the same Church in June of last year.

…And Florence and Ross, they are both opticians, thanks for the advice, they told me where I should have gone. See you on 12th May.

In the last few years it has become normal practice to view pictures on a computer screen but a beautifully made album is still very special.

A good album is a treat for all of the senses, well most. Of course the images  will be gentle on the eye, but the feel, smell and… yes sound (I’ll get to that in a minute) of one of our very special Jorgensen Albums is a delight.

We can just make a disc of your wedding pictures for you to do with what you will; in fact all of our packages includes a disc anyway but why would you leave out such a beautiful object that is crafted to out live the subjects of it’s content.

We have been supplying Jorgensen Albums ever since they first appeared in the UK around 17 years ago. We love them so much we even wrote a testimonial for their web site and they use some of the pictures we shot in their advertising.

Our Jorgensen Albums are more than just a portfolio for your pictures though. Each album we produce is lovingly designed to tell the story of your wedding day. We start thinking about the design as soon as we meet for our initial consultation. Throughout the Wedding day we make your pictures with the album very much in mind.

Each album is made to order in the Western Australia workshop it really is a bespoke service.

We take delivery of the bound album and overlays. We then make the hand made, fibre based Giclée prints that are used in the album and carefully and lovingly assemble the finished album.

So, your album is obviously a visual feast but the leather has that very luxurious aroma (if you have a problem with leather there are a lot of other materials to choose from), the albums are sensual to the touch and yes, there is even a harmonious escape of air as you close the lid of the presentation box.

Click on this link and open the slideshow to full screen to see some of our album designs.

I’m involved with helping other wedding photographers develop their craft and establish their businesses, so I get to meet lots of photographers. Some give themselves labels that help to define their approach. I have heard “reportage”, “photojournalistic” and “documentary”; those are just some of the words that describe our own approach. Often though, even photographers using the same words do not have the same approach or philosophy. So it must be confusing for couples looking to book a photographer.

Twenty odd years ago, when I set out to work the way I do now, I made some choices about the way I would approach wedding photography. In those days all wedding photography was posed. The photographers, and I was one of them, used big cameras the size, shape and weight of a house brick. The camera was usually mounted on a tripod and the film that it was loaded with was not particularly sensitive so the photographer often had to resort to flash. Because the camera was often tripod mounted the photographer could not be very mobile, so in general, the subject came to the camera. Each image was staged and arranged, it had to be, and that meant the photographer had control.

I talked about wedding portraiture in last week’s post on here because we do get asked to make some posed portraits and group pictures at most of the weddings we document. Twenty odd years ago though every picture we made at a wedding was posed for. Back then I remember hearing people say that they didn’t want to book a photographer because they thought all of that posing and interruption from the photographer would spoil their day. Venues often complained about photographers who held up proceedings by taking time over posing pictures, guests got bored and Ministers banned photographers from their Churches. The photographer often dominated wedding days, no wonder we had such an awful reputation.

So, as a wedding photographer and one who was interested in documentary photography I thought there must be a better way. That was when I started approaching weddings the way I do now. At the same time others were realising the advantages of working that way too. At the same time film technology took off allowing us to use more sensitive films in more portable cameras.  There are two facts that feed the whole of my personal philosophy of wedding photography.

1 I won’t interfere with proceedings.

2 The images I make must have integrity.

So, that means I will not stop, create, recreate, pose, arrange or manipulate any scene. Here’s the caveat again, when requested we will make portraits and group pictures that will have to be arranged. That means to do what we do we have to approach our subject, the wedding day, with a velvet hand and a hawk’s eye. As documentary wedding photographers we are responsible for seeing and recording individual moments that, when arranged in context of others, will relay a factual account of any given wedding day.

The approach, as you would imagine became very popular and wedding photographers up and down the country were asked to make wedding pictures in the style. The trouble was that most wedding photographers understood the technical, compositional and aesthetic aspects of wedding portraiture. They knew how to arrange shape, form and colour to make pleasing individual pictures but were not versed in the technique of story telling or shooting for the decisive moment. They were trained to control all of the elements of each picture and to create or recreate events for the sake of photographs.

It is not easy to make wedding documents the way we do but other wedding photographers were under pressure to try. When I look at a lot of wedding photographers work I see now, a mix, a hybrid of style has evolved. I have seen pictures of Brides apparently applying make up in a mirror but their expression appears uncomfortable, often a self-conscious smile reveals that the photographer has arranged the image. There is a clear distinction between a smile for a photograph and one that has occurred because the subject is happy. On any given wedding day there are the full range of emotions on display. Only a documentary photographer with the integrity we have will document them all.

While I believe there are a number of photographers now who make images that allude to narrative, appear natural and are not as stiff looking as the ones we made in the old days they will stop and influence the story that they tell.

What do we mean by documentary wedding photography?

It’s pure story telling that is unobtrusive and with integrity. We will document your wedding the way it is, but with a compassionate eye so your memories will be of your day not of having your photograph taken.