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I’d like to explain exactly what is meant by the term “wedding photojournalism” for those unaccustomed to that style of wedding photography.  This is what I practice.

Wedding Photojournalism is a type of documentary photography, designed to capture the actual events of your wedding. It seems to be what virtually all wedding couples that we’re meeting are looking for. This makes sense since photojournalism (in the right hands) captures a special day and all of its memories. A lot of the wedding magazines and websites out there have contradictory info, however, which serves only to further confuse an already difficult search for the correct wedding photographer.

What I do as a wedding photographer is to concentrate on authentic experiences, instead of staged ones. Rather than stopping your day to get a staged posed shot, the best shots reveal themselves when I stay in the background and look for genuine interactions to tell the story of the day. Of course the key events will be there, because the exchange of rings, the kiss, the first dance — these are momentous occasions.  But, instead of telling you where to go and how to be, I want to retreat into the background and capture the look between the bride and her mother, the goofing around of the ring bearer and the flower girl, the look of pride in the bride’s father’s eye.

These moments don’t happen when people are being herded around in some plan-a-grammed event.

Contrast this with what is going on among other wedding photogrpahers who call themselves wedding photojournalists. Once bridal magazines got word of the new trend, they made it the “hot” look for wedding photography. As happens in any industry, this caused traditional wedding photographers — the ones who are most comfortabel telling everyone where to stand and making you repeat the “first kiss” six times to get six angles — to get on the wedding photojournalism bandwagon as well, including those without the real skills or temperment to do wedding photojournalism. What they did was falsify the attributes of wedding photojournalism by arranging manipulated “authentic” expereiences. But who does this fool? Well, it fools the next client, but not this one, because this one will forever know that the photo in the wedding album above the caption “first kiss” actually wasn’t.

As we tell all prospective clients and remind everyone on the wedding day, we are more than happy to take groups shots and arrange shots. After all, a wedding is a wonderful time for people to gather and look their best. But the soul of our wedding photography is in our phorojournalistic style — and there, we are second to none.