WITH THE SMILES by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN SINTRA
Portrait photos of the bride and groom just before their wedding ceremony at Quinta de Nossa Senhora da Serra in Sintra
Reading signs
On laughter and smiles as the wedding photographer sees them. When we approach someone, no matter where we are, the first thing we do, even if we don’t notice it, is a quick scan of the face of the person we approached by merely crossing the street or because we arranged a meeting with that person.
We immediately make a judgment and the way we approach them, or read them, has to do with that first visual contact, which may be confirmed or not. Normally, the entire follow-up of the communication that begins there depends on that mutual, immediate reading. Life teaches us to read those signs and with them, communication is established.
Other people’s smiles and photographs
Now, the wedding photographer is not in the place, where he is, to establish communication but to see, to read, the communication between those who participate in the wedding day. That is his role, except on rare occasions. This is not to say that he should be glum in the midst of so much life and not call anyone. Not at all.
Only what makes him a photographer should be directed to the faces of others that attract him to do what is important, photos. Now, on a wedding day, there will be few people who are not smiling with happy eyes, except some teenagers without patience for these things, some who missed their club’s football match or someone to whom the night did not give a good rest.
The smile is everywhere and that’s why the wedding photographer likes to be it. In such a complicated world, spending a day collecting smiling faces, because happy or for the happiness of others, is a great privilege that I can only be grateful for.
Photographer drawn to smiles
I am not going to make a phenomenology of the smile here, of its quality, sincerity, or interest because that would be to deny the main reason why the wedding photographer was called to be there. A place where you smile because you are happy, you are doing what you want and desire and all those who participate are willingly participating in this happiness that everyone wants to be perennial and eternal.
Nor could it be any other way. That’s why the wedding photographer is attracted by them, the smiles, and his lens, which has already been talked about a lot here, don’t have a minute’s rest in catching them because they’ve seen them shining because of their sincerity, satisfied because the food was good, delirious because the party was great and tired because it finished late.
They, the smiles, are of many types, genders, and sizes but they are the ones that lit up this day that has passed and many others where the wedding photographer knows where to find them, provided they want it there, to keep them forever.
Without a doubt.
- In Quinta de Nossa Senhora da Serra in Sintra
