The civil ceremony is a test of expertise and clairvoyance for the wedding photographer. It’s for the wedding as the time trial is for the bicycle race or, with some exaggeration, as Formula One is for the car driver. We know that it will be much quicker than the religious ceremony. We just don’t know how much. It depends a lot on the person who will preside over the ceremony. If more bureaucratic and only concerned with the rules of the ceremony or if more knowledgeable of the importance of the act to which it presides.
So, to produce consistent coverage and as comprehensive as possible of what is happening the wedding photographer enters a high-speed regime, shuts down all other senses and only the view counts. With a rapidity to which, probably, only high-speed runners know, begin to appear in front of you all the various possible angles of catching as if they were flashes of images in the fantastic film that, you know, must happen without flaws because we won’t get a second chance. After, very, very little time it all ends and the photographer feels like he’s done a 100m athletic race.
This is to say that I always feel a great challenge in all the wedding covers that I have the chance to do. In addition to the challenge of rapidity in civil marriage, the resilient and prospector spirit for the best angle and moment in any of the places where the ceremony manifests itself.
I recognize that the wedding ceremony on the beach is the hardest to get. Sometimes the relationships of the time of day, direction, angle, intensity, and quality of sunlight, wind, and other small unexpected, make the challenge of the best photographic solution difficult but attractive and always compensating for the wedding photographer.
I think, in the case of Sofia and Antonio I achieved this goal that follows me as soon as I started photographing any marriage: tell the story of the day with good photographs.
