Like us, the cameramen and women who record your wedding video, your photographer is with you for most of your wedding day. Some excellent wedding photographers like John Brandwood and Daniel Killoran, share our view – that our job is to record your happy day – and then to let you enjoy it as well. That means getting our work done then leaving you to spend as much of the day as possible with your family and friends.
Sadly, it isn’t how all photographers work – as this honest description of one of our recent weddings shows.
First the photographer spends over three hours snapping the bride’s preparation. When we arrive at 10.30am (early because of prudence regarding the traffic) the bride is ready to roll for her 1pm wedding. All she has to do is put her dress on. The photographer arrived an hour before us and is now working his way through every leaf of her bouquet and then the bridesmaids. The church is 12 minutes away so we have enough time to shoot our prep section, do the bride interview and enjoy a coffee and a scone at a garden centre on the way.
Despite her commendable preparation and organisation the bride arrives at the church at 1.10pm.
At 1.40pm the pastor (who is wearing our radio mic) is recorded saying to the photographer, “if you don’t stop taking photos right now, there will be no wedding. No, not one more.”
At 2.10pm the wedding party leaves the church. It is raining, not lightly – this is July in Manchester, come on. The photographer begins to work his way through several A5 sheets of formals shots – in the deluge. The ladies’ hair-do’s are collapsing; the dresses are becoming more transparent as they soak up the rain like sheets of Plenty; the stretched Hummer’s engine is overheating; the biodegradable confetti is biodegrading in the guests’ hands; the pastor has locked the church and gone home to his lunch and most of the guests are wishing they’d gone with him.
At 2.30pm the wedding car arrives at the hotel – where weddings are exquisitely run by the most charming yet organised wedding co-ordinator in the land. The rain ceases and the sun comes out. The wedding guests, who’ve retreated to the cocktail bar are summoned by the photographer to the lawn, still sparklingly drenched by the previous morning’s rain. Only those who are reeling from paying £4 a pint for the local brew or £3.50 for a small cup of coffee are at all happy. (When coffee costs more than Starbucks you know you’re being screwed.)
The hotel’s Wedding Organiser puts back the time for the guests to enter the breakfast room to 4.15pm. She knows this photographer.
At 4.05pm the photographer accedes to the wedding party’s demand to stop posing them in the most ludicrous and unlikely set-ups ever devised by man or Nijinsky and allows them to meet their guests. If you thought the top hat-throw or the ushers line-run was corny you ain’t seen this photographer’s “Jazz-it-up” pose – he even gives them names! That consists of B&G and a dozen attendants crouching down whilst looking up with arms outstretched à la Al Jolson snapped from a hotel dining chair which is sinking into the sodden lawn even as he clicks. This is not a photographer but a failed designer of synchronised swimming routines in which the swimmers routinely drowned. At the front door to the hotel, the waiter who’s been standing rock-steady ready with glasses of Buck’s Fizz on a silver salver for the bride and groom since 1.45pm presents his cocktails and begins to relieve the rigor mortis into which his elbow has set.
The speeches precede the breakfast. We have our three cameras in two positions, advised to the photographer in writing days before the wedding. Is it beyond the whit of any photographic college student to devise other positions or angles around the room from which to snap people talking? Not this one.
During the speeches we discover that for all his loud-mouth bragging about his £1600 lenses to the bride’s step-father who’s had the temerity to bring his Nikon D3s along to snap the girl, the photographer has no idea how wide the zoom lens of our cameras are and insists on standing in one side of our safety shot frame despite repeated requests not to. When he does move it’s to the front of our third camera sited to record the guests’ reactions. His rationale appears to be if the video people have taken those positions then those must be “the ones”. I suppose we should be flattered that the photographer thinks we’ve chosen the top two places but we aren’t. One is left with the distinct impression that the photographer spends his evenings devising ever-more extreme and unlikely poses and “creative situations” as if his only USP (marketing-speak for difference) is how bizarre he can make his clients look.
The evening reception includes several dozen more guests – whose first thought is to find out which salon did the bridesmaids’ hair and remember not to go there.
They are treated to a lavish event including white and milk chocolate fountains, a beautiful ice sculpture to hold the seating plan and a spectacular champagne luge carved from a piece of glacier you last saw falling off the Antarctic ice shelf into the Ross Sea.
And where are their hosts, the new Mr and Mrs? Oh they’re being creatively snapped by the photographer, whilst illuminated by his “several thousand pounds worth” of flashgun and the moonlight glancing off the raindrops on the still-soaking greensward.
So what conclusions can you draw from this example? Firstly that whilst this guy’s not alone, there are some very excellent wedding photographers around. Secondly, price is not a perfect guide – this example is not a £250 all in con-man but a high priced wedding photography business. Perhaps the best advice is not to rely on the pictures (they’ll never show you bad ones) or testimonials (when did you last see a bad testimonial?) but to visit some and meet them face to face. Make sure you’re meeting the photographer himself and that he’ll be doing the job himself on the day. Most important of all, trust your instinct. This person’s probably going to be around most of the day so it’s important you choose someone you feel you can get on with.
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