REFERENCE by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN MAFRA

The photos are from inside the Basilica of Mafra during the wedding ceremony

• Pode ler este artigo em Português. 

A sense of scale for the photographs

I often find myself watching a nature documentary and wondering whether the animal, plant, landscape, rock, or waterfall I’m looking at is big, small, or something else. All because I lack a sense of scale. There are things that you can tell more or less right away how big they are. But there are those whose size is so harmonious, so perfect in scale, that they can be a meter high or a hundred meters high and we can never tell unless we have something to give us a scale, a measurement reference.

The relationship between measurement and photography

This is true of wedding photographers in churches. There are big ones, small ones, and very, very big ones. But if you don’t have something inside that you know to give you a sense of size, it’s always difficult to get an idea, from a photograph, of how big the space is.

How many of us on a trip have never been disappointed by the size of a square, waterfall, or valley that we had seen in a photograph, which gave us a completely different idea of the reality we found? This is due to two things. One is the lack of a reference – a person, a car, or an animal – to establish a relationship between the measurements we know and calculate the real size. The other is the alteration that lenses can make in terms of the notion of space, depth, and vanishing lines.

During a wedding ceremony

Since photographers, including wedding photographers, need to include as much space as possible, to show this they use a wide-angle lens, which tends to increase the feeling of size. So, just like a church during a wedding ceremony, if we have the human element in the image, we can calculate and get an idea of the real size of the space.

You can see what the wedding photographer described in the photo at the top and the second one after the text.

Dot by dot:

• Whenever we need to get a sense of the size of what’s in a photograph or on film, we have to find something we know to give us a sense of scale.

• The wedding photographer often finds this in a large church. Who, when traveling, has never been disappointed by the size of a city square that seemed huge in the photographs?

• That’s why it’s important always to include the human element in wide-angle shots, whenever the wedding photographer wants to show the interior of the church or cathedral where the wedding ceremony is taking place.

You need to know:

• Although this is a rather technical article about scale in photography, it shows that the photographer always knows how to frame the locations of wedding events. He’ll do it for yours too. So contact me now and I’ll be there.

• The photos are of the Basilica of Mafra