When brides start thinking about choosing a wedding photographer for their wedding shots and album, they are often confused! What do they want and what is the actual role of the photographs and the photographer? Here is a useful way to conceive of that role: your wedding photographer is your wedding's ghost writer who tells your wedding's story. The better the photographer, the better the writer and the most interesting and moving the story.

 

Let's be honest, it is not that photographers have better equipment than your friends. Once upon a time photography was technically complex, but today it is open to all. (Having said that, professional photographers spend $4000 on their lenses and it shows in the final photo) In the same way writers don't have better word processors, they just write better. Good wedding photographers share the characteristics of a really good writer: they have an eye for the telling detail, the vignette, the moment that means something, the gesture. If writers work with verbs and nouns, the photographer works with light and colour.

Sure, we photographers have to be technically good and know what our camera can do instantly which comes with practice, but we also need to have a feel for the story and how it can be told. As the years pass we want our clients to return to their wedding album or photographs and remember how amazing the day "felt". We don't just record history we help to shape it so that the wedding is even better afterwards.

Many brides and grooms pass through the wedding in a daze of excitement. Sometimes, they feel that they have almost missed their wedding in all the rush and adrenalin. I try to give them a second chance to experience that wedding and to make sure that the wedding actually is the way they want it to be.

So, when you are choosing your wedding photographer, ask yourself this question: do they tell wedding stories the way I want mine to be told.