Don't Lose the Moment

OK…I get that some people can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars on the perfect wedding: the lavish ceremony, expensive once-ever clothing, the delicious catered dinner, the roaring party with live music and free booze, the honeymoon in the Caribbean…the professionally shot photographs.

It’s all expensive but, for most, it’s a little (or a lot) beyond reach. Which means choices must be mad and hard decisions must narrow the field between what’s possible and what’s not going to happen.

Unfortunately, these decisions almost always favor the moment…the ceremony and the party…what people are going to think when they see a packed church and a mouth-water feast…or the opposite.

In these days of cell phones and social media, it seems that wedding photography is sliding past the back seat and into the trunk. Good wedding photography is expensive and good wedding photographers are never cheap and it’s not just because they’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on training and education, equipment and other essentials like maybe a studio.

What makes these people valuable isn’t the equipment or the training…it’s the experience and the natural feel for it. They’ve shot dozens, maybe hundreds, of weddings. They know how to time things to be in the right place at the right time to get those two hands, hers and his, together as they grasp the knife to cut the cake. They know where and when to be in the aisles and seats to capture the kiss and the joy of the moement. No one in their images has closed eyes. No one in their images has a lamp bursting out of their head. The pictures are sharp. The pictures capture your eyes and hold them.

Wedding photography is not a craft or profession…it’s an art.

A mistake that most couples make is thinking that they’ll be hiring a photographer to capture memories of the wedding. Good wedding photographers don’t capture memories, they preserve the moment. They capture the feeling of the moment so that you might look at the image 20 years later and forget the names of everyone in the picture, but you’ll re-experience what you felt at that moment.

And that’s what separates the amateurs from the professionals: the professional photographer has the knowledge, the experience and the feel to capture everything about the wedding that will mean something to the couple for the rest of their lives.

And here’s the catch: You get just one chance at this. Your wedding day will be one day and it won’t be repeated. What happens that day, happens that day, and it’s gone forever at the end of that day.

Except for the pictures.

If the pictures don’t capture the moments: if lamp poles stick out the tops of everyone’s heads, or if half the people in the image have their eyes closed, or the main subject is standing just behind someone no one recognizes…if any of these and hundreds of other little things go wrong then that’s it…you live with a bunch of poorly captured memories.

If you’re getting married with very little notice then you don’t have a lot of choices. If you have a year or more, then you have time to plan and save. My advice: put enough money aside to have your photography done by a professional and you won’t have just a bunch of memories of a day that’s grown vague over the years…you’ll have a fresh feeling for one of the most important days of your life.

BTW…

A bit of advice if you plan to go threadbare on the photography. If the photographer doesn’t have a website or social media page, avoid like poison. They have nothing to show because they have nothing to show. For the ones who do have sites, study their work and compare. If you’re going to go on the cheap, at least get the best of the cheap.

© Biff Mitchell (www.biffmitchell.com)

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