Steven Taylor Mentoring Blog » The blog page of Steven Taylor Mentoring

 

I don’t normally take much notice of the “Rock Star” evangelists that pop up every now and then in our profession; they usually disappear as fast as they arrive. So I couldn’t really tell you what it is they are saying, some may even talk some sense but the nature of their delivery and self appointed celebrity turns me off before they start. I’ll never be a part of their audience.

 

One day last week though, Facebook and Twitter erupted because one of these types had published his plan for World domination that, in a nutshell told us all that wedding photography was easy. All you needed was some cameras, one of his web sites, a few friends, enough knowledge of our craft to know where the “P” button was located and God on your side. Well, without getting into the religious angle of his argument, for all sorts of reasons not least that some may find his statements blasphemous, his idea was irresponsible and ill informed.

 

So, that in mind, I thought I would tell it the way I see it.
Wedding photography is not, or should not be, about fashion. We record fashion but what we produce, which is part service and part product, should outlive ourselves and the subject of our images. We have the very responsible job of recording family and social history. It’s not just a way of making a living. That’s why when some of us say we are passionate about what we do it is credible while others who use the words don’t convince us with their actions.

We have a duty to our clients and future generations to be the best we can be.

I have spoken to great photographers from other genres that say they could never take on the responsibility of photographing a wedding. You can’t go back and do it again if it goes wrong. It is immoral for anybody to accept payment for any service they are not capable of delivering. That “rock Star’s” answer to if you are not sure what to photograph was to “spray and Pray” and let the camera work out the settings. Well for an inexperienced photographer who has no regard for the result or compassion for the subject that might not appear unreasonable. The writer of the original comment had a very brief career (6 years) in wedding photography himself and the work he produced in that time was questionable.

 

In recent years, probably since digital technology got good enough to use commercially, we have seen an influx of individuals with cameras who are advertising themselves as wedding photographers. Some even get work, but the standard they deliver is not as it should be.

My generation of documentary wedding photographers must take some of the responsibility for this lowering of standards because we questioned the stiff and starchy approach to wedding photography. We sometimes let less than perfect through because we put narrative higher on the list of attributes for a great wedding document… But the ideal has been taken too literally and out of context now. We don’t want to go back to the archaic principles that judged our work before but we do want our images to make sense. The documentary approach has it’s own set of standards that are about story telling, every image counts, one places context for another and meaning is paramount.

There is a world of difference between what we do as documentary photographers and what these “spray and pray” exponents deliver. We consider every image, and the document as a whole. We are not pointing the camera indiscriminately hoping we’ll get something that matters, we watch and observe, we soak in the atmosphere, we look for light and wait until the subject moves into that light and we look for the body language or expression that tell the story. We do all of that with our bare eyes, we don’t lift the camera until we see the moment we have been waiting for. “Spray and Pray” will deliver nothing of significance… try it, but not on somebody’s wedding.

 

Our way of working can only be successful if we are 100% confident with our craft. There is no room for error in this approach or any type of wedding photography for that matter. As I said the documentary style sometimes means we sacrifice photographic perfection in favour of the story, but we must understand the rules in order to break them.

Personally I use the aperture priority setting for most of the time, sometimes manual and occasionally shutter priority. A and S or in the case of Canon, Av and Tv, are similar to manual anyway it just means you are controlling the aperture or shutter and letting the camera work out the other setting. I’m not sure why there is a “P” button on professional cameras. If we leave the camera to set aperture and shutter it will always go for a middle ground that, in an ideal world will give good depth of field with a movement freezing shutter speed. As storytellers we want to be able to use short or long depth of field, fast or slow shutter speeds to create a mood, a sense that will allude to the story we are telling.

 

Amateur photographers used to be obsessed with asking technical questions, “what shutter speed are you using?” Etc. The magazines used to print all the technical data under each picture, they might still but I haven’t read one for a long time. The great photographer and teacher Minor White once gave us as a caption to an image “…For technical data—the camera was faithfully used…” He was very aware of the technique he employed it was just that as an artist he cared more about the message, as a teacher he may have elaborated within the confines of the workshop.

 

Technique is not important as long as it’s second nature, it’s certainly not important to the client unless it’s wrong. As professional photographers we shouldn’t need to think beyond making the image right for the story. We should be able to operate a camera like we drive our cars. When we learned to drive we had to think about when to change gear and when to check the mirror. Now we do all that without a second thought.

Fundamentally, the biggest mistake our “Rock Star” friend made was suggesting that anyone can buy a camera and become a wedding photographer over night. The truth is it takes, study and practice, and I wouldn’t trust anybody to record somebody’s precious memories of their most important day until they have done a fair bit of both.

 

 

I have spoken to countless wedding photographers over the years and read and contributed on forums dedicated to the business of photography. I find it staggering that many of those wedding photographers, who claim on their web sites to have a passion for image making, fail to name more than one important photographer that has shaped the medium. Often wedding photographers can only name other wedding photographers as influence. If we as individual photographers, and the profession as a whole, are to move forward we need to understand the past and to look outside of our profession for influence.

It’s well documented that my big influence, as a wedding photographer is Henri Cartier-Bresson. I am a big fan of his images as I am of countless others; but it is HCB’s words that really shape my philosophy. The way I approach wedding photography owes a huge debt to the photojournalists that made the images for the picture magazines that had their heyday after the First World War and before television found it’s way into the majority of homes.

The most popular way of learning about the world in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s was through the pages of the pictorial magazines. “Life” in the US, “Picture Post” in the UK, “Paris Match” in France and “Stern” in Germany provided the staple, visual information for the common man.

Photographers of that time brought not just news but education about other lives and cultures. Some, like W. Eugene Smith believed that their images could make a difference.

 

 

 “…Photo is a small voice, but sometimes-just sometimes-one photograph or a group of them

 can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs

 can summon  enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought…”

W. Eugene Smith

 

 

 

 

 

W. Eugene Smith, Saipan, 1944 Copyright Magnum Photos

 

The story-telling methods employed by photojournalists then and now are shared by other media. Essayists, filmmakers, poets and novelists all use similar methods. Photography, after all is just another language, as useful for expression as the spoken or written word. The key, for me, in understanding documentary wedding photography was to stop thinking like a photographer, seeking out stand-alone images and start thinking like an essayist.

 

“…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

 

 

We will use sequences and series of images that contextualise one another to create a coherent story. Just occasionally we will use a single image that can stand on it’s own and is loaded with narrative but mostly we need more than one image to put the story across.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duane Michals, Chance Meeting, 1970

Copyright Duane Michals.

 

 

 

Often, we produce sequences that are about single events but the wedding document (album/slideshow/press book etc.) is a sequence in itself. A good wedding document should have a point of departure, transitional establishing shots and a conclusion that wraps up the content of the whole.

 

 

We usually start our coverage 2 hours before the wedding ceremony but it would be just as valid to begin months before the wedding, even at the point when the couple meet. We could continue our coverage throughout the lives of the couple. For economy and sanity we limit ourselves to the wedding day itself and usually conclude with dancing.

 

 

 

One of the problems we have as wedding photographers is that the standards we have been set by the associations and awards judges are based on the surface qualities of a single image. They are not taking into account meaning or context. They are simply concerned with the formal structure and impact of one picture. In order to produce a meaningful document of a wedding day we need to consider much more and sometimes, an over occupation with the formal qualities of single images will get in the way of producing such a document.

 

There is so much more and I will continue on here in the coming weeks.

 

We have devised a programme of seminars and workshops up and down the UK, the dates and locations will be on here in the next two weeks.