WORK DONE by WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN LISBON

Some of the photos at Quinta da Bichinha in Alenquer, when the bride is in the last details for the wedding ceremony

• Pode ler este artigo em Português. 

I’ve been a wedding photographer for many years

Those final moments. Everything is ready, the bride can go to the wedding ceremony, the nervousness starts to set in and, while you’re waiting to hear who’s going to take you to your partner, you still find something to put right a small detail, no, it’s still not as it should be.

I’ve been a wedding photographer for many years. I’ve had the pleasure of photographing so many brides that nothing should be new, I should know exactly when the task of completing a bride is done and even guess, as is my duty, where the right place to photograph her will be as soon as she begins her walk towards the yes, I accept.

That, too, would probably mean that everything was already to be expected, I wouldn’t already have the need to react to what isn’t foreseen, which fuels any self-respecting photographer, and I’d probably have already looked for another direction for my lens.

The next few moments

This relates to something that, fortunately, I haven’t been able to figure out to this day. Why, in those moments when the work is done, everyone involved in the making of a bride has finished the day, some have already left, someone still finds a button that’s a little out of place with the others on the bride’s dress, a little line has been spotted peeking through the lace on the right shoulder or finds a flaw in the train of the dress that only she (he) can see and everything that the wedding photographer had planned, guessed, for the next few moments disappears in front of his eyes.

Affections that offer photographs on the wedding day

I don’t know, but I have theories about it. It’s good because, for me, starting to anticipate every move would start to be problematic because I’d no longer have in front of me those photos that appear from who knows where because someone decided at the last minute, instead of just wishing well to the bride, to find something for her, him, to solve and thus ensure that nothing is out of place. I and the wedding photographer agree, and we call that affection.

I can’t tell you how many of these affections gave me great photographs when I thought there was nothing left to do. As I’ve never liked an easy life, the wedding photographer always finds in these last-minute affections a good reason not to let the process be finished before moving on to the next stage of the wedding day.

Dot by dot:

• When a bride is in the final moments of her preparation for the wedding ceremony, everything should be guessable.

• It’s in those final moments that someone comes along who still seems to find something not quite right, at least in their eyes, and more wedding photographs are taken, of course.

• That’s why nothing can be anticipated or taken for granted. The wedding photographer has a name for that: last-minute affections.

You need to know:

• It will also be like this at your wedding. Although everything seems to be as it is, everything will be different too, even the affections the photographer always brings. Call me to bring yours.

• The bride is ready to go for the wedding ceremony at Quinta da Bichinha in Alenquer, Portugal