THE PLEASURE OF DOING by THE PORTUGAL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
The bride, after getting ready for the wedding ceremony at the Basilica of Mafra
Being a photograph
The joy of the anticipation of what makes a photo, a photograph. I already have been told here my notions about what could be a photograph, even outside my wedding photography area. What is needed to make it not a photo, but a photograph?
There is a great difference between one and another. One photo can be any impression made by a photographic camera, with its inseparable lens, over any subject that must be, also, viewable by the eyes that command that camera. It can be something just to register that we have been there, that we like it or, even, love it, that seems fun and it is worth registering, or just because we have it, the camera, in our hands and we want just to burn some time.
Since it was born, photography fulfilled all those functions and still is one of our main interests, even after all this time.
Harmony in the frame
Of course, that photography, even the wedding one, is, also, everything like this. But it needs something in the execution that pushes it to the next level. Notions of framing take me to the right positioning place, the point of view, and can change the way the eyes see it.
In addition to framing, I need to carefully find what I want in there, I need to choose how I want it in there, usually with the best angle for it, to get the harmony possible and deliver ways to guide the eyes, as if we were reading a page of a book, leading our imagination.
Those decisions can transform that light catch, that spills over what we like, into something overwhelming or the short way to the garbage basket. Some photos just exist because the moment they were made was…the moment.
So, the same subject, those things we are about to photograph, chased by two photographers, even the wedding ones, can make that difference between a photo and a photograph. How do I know that? The eyes. Mine and all those from people who love to see them after they were taken.
Study and photography, such as wedding photography
Using the rules, and the tools, that I described above there is a great certainty that the eyes will love better one than another. Same subject but very different result. So, it is true that all of us can decide what is a photograph but, as with many other things, not everybody can do it, take it. I do not say it because there is some failure that unable everybody less gifted.
No, but not everybody invests time, and experience over and over, studying the hows and the whys in the way to achieve that knowledge necessary to use it at the moment to take a picture. And that can be the difference between the photo and the photograph.
But do not think that I have the arrogance to say that someone without that knowledge should not perform the pleasure of photographing. Not at all, I know exactly the joy of doing that.
So, be happy pulling the shutter buttons of your cameras because I, as a wedding photographer, do not think about stopping it.
