Tips and Tricks :: One For The Newspaper

As wedding photographers, it’s important to define your style and try to find a name for what you do so couples can have an easy time understanding what exactly they should expect. For us, we try to incorporate several styles of photography into our overall wedding day approach, and we believe the story of a wedding day is best told through various types of images. We use product photography to arrange bridal details into lifelike, but perfected vignettes as we photograph them. We stand back and put our “photojournalist” hats on when the time is right for that approach, letting moments unfold on their own. Other times, we help moments along and take on a more editorial approach to portions of a wedding day. We’re no strangers to moving a chair next to a window and asking our Bride to put her earrings on there, ensuring her photos will be light, bright and gorgeous. When it’s time to gather up your family for heirloom portraits of the people you love, we go into classic portrait mode to ensure our couples receive clean and classic portraits with their loved ones. And then there are the times we photograph our couples, just the two of them. During both engagement sessions, and portrait times on a wedding day we will always make it a priority to work with our couples in a relaxed way, creating portraits that will last a lifetime and preserve their love’s legacy.

 

 

 

During our rebrand, we were asked to define our style with three words. Those we ended up coming back to time and time again were “Authentic, Timeless, and Romantic”. When it comes to the portraits of our couples, our goal is to create clean and beautiful images that showcase the true connection each couple shares. There are techniques and methods we have learned over the years to evoke real emotion out of our couples while photographing them. When couples come to us, they tell us how much they love how relaxed our couples look in photos, and how “candid” the photos seem. It’s a huge compliment to hear those words, and we continue to strive to lead our couples through their portrait sessions in ways that make them feel relaxed, and create beautiful images. We absolutely are staging portraits, but we go about it a little less formally and in a way that creates real moments between each couple.

Now that we’ve established that our goal is to create natural and “candid” (for lack of a better term) portraits of our couples, we want to talk about particular photo we always take on a wedding day. This one isn’t candid in the slightest, and the couple is completely “camera aware”. We call this photo “one for the newspaper”. Somewhere in the middle of strolling through a garden or whispering love songs into one another’s ear, we will ask our couple to hug each other tightly, look straight at the camera and smile. That one photo, looking directly at the camera, smiling together on your wedding day will be “one for the newspaper” so to speak. This photo is sometimes met with hesitation. “Oh, why are we doing that? Aren’t we supposed to be natural? This doesn’t feel natural.” It might not, and we completely understand why couples might not enjoy taking this photo, but we promise it’s necessary, and very much worth it. Plus, it only takes a second 😉

Your parents will thank you. Your grandparents will thank you. Your great grandchildren will thank you, and your 60 year old selves will thank you for stopping to smile at the camera, for just one shot. Of the hundreds of gorgeous portraits we create together, you’ll fall in love with several and cherish them over the years. But even more years from now, when your photo is pulled down from a mantle, it will be this one classic portrait that will make them say “oh there they are… that’s what my grandparents looked like on their wedding day.”