THE BIG DEAL for THE PORTUGAL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
Setting out, with my wedding couple of the day, for our wedding photography tour with just them, has great significance for me as a professional and, crucially as a wedding photographer. As a professional, the fascination with portraiture I saw in photography magazines and beyond was pulling me towards the side of cameras, into the world of lenses and their mysteries.
However, my first experiences with them were in other wider subjects like the mountains of the French Pyrenees, the great culprits of the passage to the infatuation that inevitably led to always having to live with them and from them for a professional life. As a wedding photographer, portraiture was also the big motif for what I knew was out there and could bring as of the best fruits in an orchard ready for harvest.
All photographers have their favorite subjects. We all know, either because we see what they do in magazines, books, and today on computer monitors and mobile phones and according to the subjects of their, and our, attraction or because we see them with their special backpacks on their backs and cameras around their necks, like some kind of vagabonds who only give importance to their subjects, what they choose to photograph, letting the rest of the world disappear as if it had no importance at all.
Some only have a lens to see, to photograph, the mountains, others flowers, others cars or motorbikes, others the universe or others, imagine, football. Then there are those at weddings. I can’t talk about the motivations of others, my colleagues, but I know what mine was. I distinctly remember being told about the idea of photographing weddings and in my head I heard a huge, resounding no. Weddings? What a thing.
Then one day, hang on, but there are portraits at weddings, aren’t there? I went to research where we do research today and it was clear as stream water from the mountains. That’s right. There are a lot of portraits there. And I went to look. There they were, walking, alone, in pairs, in groups, in conversation, lazing in the sun after a copious meal, sitting, kneeling, hurrying, jostling, already tired, out of breath, kissing, hugging, saying goodbye, jumping after bridal bouquets, waiting for a slice of cake, cutting the cake, etc, etc, etc.
I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing such was the abundance through the viewfinder of my cameras and what I could do with them through my lenses, each in its way, resulting in wedding photographs.
And that’s how I became a wedding photographer. All because of the portraits that brides, grooms, and all those who surround them, for the love they have for them, are building all the time, ready to be harvested to mature as photos that will carry with them forever. There, that’s how the wedding photographer became one of them, because of the portrait.
