FACES for the ESTORIL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
As a photographer, I find it most pleasurable to photograph faces. Not necessarily close-ups of faces, which I like a lot, but faces manifesting themselves according to the sensations that come to them with what surrounds them, in what they are doing or seeing, with whom they are, or even, these I love, those that are in the land of imagination, lost, at least momentarily, to the world of real things.
As a wedding photographer, I have access to many faces subject to many reactions according to what they do, what they receive, what and who they look at, and, fundamentally, how they feel. Bringing them all into photographs, because I caught them at that right moment how photographers love, is a satisfaction hard to match for anyone.
Without a shadow of a doubt, I can say that the wedding photographer’s work is done with faces. Come to think of it, I don’t even look for anything else for an entire day made up on purpose for wedding photographers.
Even if one of them, photos, has a lot of people in it in those confusions of people that certain parts of weddings have like, for example, in the exit of the bride and groom from the ceremony and where everyone wants to congratulate them, it’s the joys of the faces that we look for as soon as we set our eyes on one of them.
We don’t care if they’re more crooked or straighter if some go ahead of others to be first, or if the composition that the wedding photographer has made of them all is so perfect that it could win an international photography award. None of that, we are only interested in seeing if those people are really happy because those two who have just got married are loaded with… happiness.
And this can only be seen, and known, through the faces that each one has. In the same way, it is through them that we know that the bride is anxious, because of the expectation, that she is suffering a little with the hair pulling from the hairdresser, because of the distress of being about to leave for the wedding ceremony and thinking that she is missing something that she cannot know what it is.
But, the face the wedding photographer likes the most and that he knows will give him beautiful wedding photographs, is the one that reacts subtly to a look from someone who with great pride looks, also, in that special way that only that face knows how to look at her.
Those, besides being subtle, are fast and have the right time to be transformed because, if the wedding photographer doesn’t have the gift of knowing how to do it at that moment, only the one who felt it and the one who sent it will know it happened.
Well, that’s what the wedding photographer is there for. A deep connoisseur of faces, their reactions, and their times. He will also know how to react in time, to wait because he feels a smile is coming on the way, that almost cry with emotion or even be ecstatic with laughter. They are like that, exuberant, unpredictable, and serene. You just have to know how to look at them.