IT IS PARTY TIME by THE PORTUGAL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER 

The bride and groom choreographed dance routines with the guests at the wedding party at Quinta da Ramila in Ortiga

• Pode ler este artigo em Português. 

Harmony, Balance, and Good Composition in a Photograph

How I love the chaos. As a wedding photographer, one of my greatest challenges is managing to extract harmony, balance, and good composition from the midst of disorder, unpredictability, and confusion. It’s as if a disorganized organization suddenly reveals itself as harmonious the moment I extract pieces that compose it.

In these situations, the wedding photographer jumps and bounces—even without being a dancer taking part in trending challenges—among guests fully immersed in things of the body, the music, and its rhythms, with some traditions mixed in.

Photography as a Cinematic Close-Up

Likewise, the photographer never stops searching for the best point of view, which is fleeting, the best way to follow the turbulence like a river after heavy rain, and, here and there, pauses without stopping to catch a detail that resembles a cinematic close-up.

Then there are those who no longer have anything left to give to the party, to the dancing, and to the other things still ahead, until finally, everyone leaves with a sense of duty fulfilled—because they participated. The wedding photographer, too, will eventually feel ready for that rest. Well deserved.

Point by point:

• My greatest challenge as a wedding photographer—and probably the one that most drives me to do it—is stepping into moments of great confusion and capturing, in the photographs, moments of real harmony.
• Photographs are harmonious moments taken from chaotic scenes, such as groups of people, like at a wedding, moving in uncoordinated ways.
• The dance floor during the wedding party is a perfect example:
  • Guests dance, despite the rhythm, in an unstructured way
  • The movement is constant and individual
  • Improvised choreographies come together and fall apart in the moment
  • People enter and exit the dance floor with no coordination
• There, in that boiling pot of confusion, the wedding photographer always finds harmonious compositions to bring back as photographs.

You need to know:

• Without repeating once more why I love photographing weddings, this may be the main reason: capturing in photographs the harmony of moments found within chaotic, unplanned events.*

• There is a guiding thread that defines what a wedding day is, but everything that surrounds it is always done spontaneously and unexpectedly. That’s what draws me to photograph this event.

No matter how detailed your wedding timeline may be, everything that follows that line obeys the randomness of the moment. That’s what will always make it a unique event—just like the photographs I will bring from it. Let’s schedule a meeting to talk about this and anything else you might need. To see more photos, too.

• In Quinta da Ramila near Fátima Portugal