DECISIONS by THE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER IN PORTUGAL
Some photos of the bride’s objects on her wedding day
Photographs made
After having spent many years, quite a few before becoming a wedding photographer, photographing consumer objects that had to be very tidy, matching well with each other in a set made by compass and obeying a drawing that the client gave me, it has to look like this you see, see if you can get this blue background, be careful not to mix the color of the object with the background of the set, use the lens well so as not to alter the proportions of the bottle, etc, etc, etc.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to make those photographs, quite the contrary. I have already written here about the difference between making photographs and taking photographs. Those were completely made to measure even if animated beings, aka people, were part of the set. But, after many years of solitaire under lights called to draw the light that was required for those sets, I have to be honest and it no longer took that pleasure we have when things fascinate us.
The object of the photography
But the technique remained. Life wanted it to change and the photographer of inanimate things and sometimes people became, or stayed, as I like best, a wedding photographer. Even today I am amazed at the joy and relief when that happened. Joy because I had discovered a way of continuing to be in photography that I liked so much and, at the same time, to have the freedom to approach the subject, that which is the object of photography, what is photographed, that did not exist until then and to be able, also, to find some of the inanimates that also exists in weddings. However, I had to decide how I would approach them, to transform them into wedding photos, because I didn’t have the time I had before, in the studio.
Photographs taken
It didn’t take long, because I had no other choice. I couldn’t take a morning to prepare the whole set for a photograph that took a five-hundredth of a second to nestle, in time, in a film that, afterward, had to swim in the dark in more or less magical liquids that transformed those inanimate things into a photograph ready to be used. Here, at a wedding, it had to be taken, many times, in the intervals that I found between all the other tasks that are part of a wedding, or else, arriving earlier or having the luck that this one has to do starts later.
So, if I am photographing a wedding as a reporter who cannot intervene in the process of the subject being photographed, so that I do not lose the innocence of the truth they are telling, why not do the same for the bride’s dress, the bouquet, the flowers for the lapel of the groom’s coat, the basket of flowers that, later, will bless the couple at the end of the ceremony. So it was decided and so it has been done by the wedding photographer.
