Is this a Wedding Photo?

For the photographers here, you know the technical way I shot this image. Flash in one hand, camera in the other. Inspired greatly by the late Larry Fink, and I guess before him, old Hollywood celebrity and society photographers.

This isn’t what is typically considered a wedding photograph, and for most people in the wedding industry - it’s not. If all you look at is the steady drip of repeatable white washed images that are on all the instagram feeds of planners and other photographers, you become conditioned into accepting only one style of image as being a “wedding photo”.

So here’s the thing though. I shoot those beautiful room shots. I do the detail shots. I shoot portraits, I shoot family photos. I just rarely show those because while they are pretty, they aren’t what I’m after as a photographer, and I know for a fact that the couples that do book me don’t really care about those template cookie cutter photographs.

Also, I am fairly sure that what I do isn’t something that can be done by anyone other than me because how I get these super close photographs are something I’ve spent years perfecting.

More importantly - THESE are the images that I love photographing at weddings. These are the moments that represent all the energy and chaos that’s often present around the last hour or so of a wedding.

I have been photographing weddings like this for a few years now, and to be honest, it does take some time to be able to walk up to people, two feet away and blast them with a flash like this, but it does work, and more importantly, I seem to get away with it every time and haven’t been punched out yet =)