The State of Wedding Photography

[Peter De Smidt]

I have 8x10 photos from both of my grand parent's weddings. In each case, There's a photo of the bride and a photo of the couple. They look like contact prints. They are very well done, and the prints look great, with no signs of deterioration, even though they were produced in the 1920s. So, my question is, why isn't that enough? Isn't a couple of well done photos worth more than a trunk of hundreds of so-so ones?

 

[Steve Smith]

I think that's enough. Judging by threads on other forums though, brides seem to expect a couple of thousand images now. I think the sixty in my wedding album is probably about right.

When my father started doing weddings he was sent out with ten glass plates and told not to waste any! That should be enough.

Seriously though, does anyone really look at their wedding albums that much? As you suggest, a couple of nice prints would be plenty especially if framed and displayed.


Steve.

 

[Bob Carnie]

I started my career as a wedding photographer, after five years seeing negatives coming back for reprinting due to fading , I came to the conclusion that it was not a profession I would continue with.
I do believe that a few well made photographs that have archival stability, would be all that the loving couple really need. Unfortunately , every one loves colour and unless one is making tri colour gums or carbons , todays prints have a a short shelf life.
The first wedding I photographed for my mentor, was a mess, I came back with way too many exposures and really no winners, He taught me to take more time and make sure every time I squeezed the button, the bride and groom would love the photo.
I am sure there are a few photographers still out there doing it right , but probably very hard to find and most likely very busy.
The studio I worked for shot 8x10 in the studio using Black White film and the core of the wedding package were contact prints on Cycora paper. Mr Philip used red coccine to open up the shadows and was a master retoucher who knew how to work on the negatives.
His prints were spectacular and I was humbled by the quality that he produced in the 50' and 60's before colour came onto the wedding scene.
When he offered me the business, I had to decline basically because of the lack of stability of the colour process.
When I hear of the state of the business now , I cringe.

I have 8x10 photos from both of my grand parent's weddings. In each case, There's a photo of the bride and a photo of the couple. They look like contact prints. They are very well done, and the prints look great, with no signs of deterioration, even though they were produced in the 1920s. So, my question is, why isn't that enough? Isn't a couple of well done photos worth more than a trunk of hundreds of so-so ones?

 

[wclark5179]

I find there are several reasons for the wishes of people today. Perhaps my view is determined from where I live & the clients I attract, culture, income, age of clients and other ingredients.

Brides today get information from various sources including, friends, magazines, movies, T.V., the internet and, I believe to a lesser degree, family including relatives. Religion can be a factor but I find less so amongst people who hire me.

Brides want to look beautiful. They get the idea/concept of beautiful images from the sources I mentioned in the above paragraph. They see very few, if any, of the photos mentioned in the first two posts, other than what parents or grandparents may have. They think the photos look stiff, unnatural and not a part of what they want to see of themselves. Whatever I think or you for that matter, in business if you're trying to earn a living in the photography profession, beauty is in the eye of the person who has the checkbook. If you want to stick to principles/art be prepared to work hard finding potential clients who share your vision or have a day job to support yourself.

Attitudes have changed. Technology has allowed it as back in the 1950's when I started in photography I couldn't make photos like I can today.

I make photos with more of a style clients want but I still use classical portrait principles that my mentor & coach Monte Zucker taught me.

Telling someone to look happy is quite different than catching them when emotions peak and they show it and want to see their wedding day as a happy day, full of little emotional blips that they want captured with photography. I advocate group photos as well. You are correct that they are important but the others are important to the client.

These people, my clients, generally, are not actors. Acting is difficult. That's why I capture them when they are happy because it won't look the same as if you tell them to look happy.

That's why I love the wedding photography business. So much variety within each wedding and each wedding is a unique event as the people react in so many different ways.

 

[mgb74]

I'll second Peter's comment. I have some wedding photos from my parents done in the late 40's. Likely with a 4x5. It's seems there was more a focus on the family, rather than the bride herself.

What was missing is a sense of spontaneity, which would complement the more formal shots well. But overall, you don't see that timeless quality as much now. Maybe a reflection of an overall bias toward quantity rather than quality. Maybe I'm just in gezer mode.

 

[removed account4]

it is a different time than the 20s or even the 50s/60s ...
brides and grooms don't remember any of their reception
so they want a ton of images ... the photographer remembers the wedding for them.

quantity is the thing now .. 5000 proof images to look at,
and cd's of images so they can share them with friends and family who were there or couldn't make it ...
i can understand why brides and grooms don't just want 2 or 3 or even just 10 images.

 

[Bob Carnie]

I met Monte Zuker in 1975, he was brought to our photo school and I do like his lighting and emotion.
What I find lacking is that if you look back at all the work that he and many others of his skill level you will find that very few if any of the wedding portraits exist today in any state of acceptable level.
I think the OP may be reflecting on the fact that he has in his hands beautiful memories of grandparents that are very tangible to him.
I have met many great wedding photographers in my course of running a photographic lab, and the most common tie with all of them is the fact that the wonderful work that they did is now a cyan mess hanging on a clients wall.
Reprinting is not a option as most of the negatives of the era Mr Zuker are very well known for are fading and turning into messy glops that are un -printable.
I was approached recently by a very well known Canadian Wedding/Portrait photographer of the same era of Mr Zuker. All his work was in colour and produced at a very good wedding lab in town. He was being asked to provide 100 portraits to the national archives and my job was to scan , edit and produce 100 individual black white silver prints.
Unfortunately all his negative were in such bad shape that I could not fix the damage of these faded colour negatives.
You only have to go into any local high school and look at the Principle Portrait wall. There is a gap in time where the images are in such poor shape compared to the rest .
I do understand that your photography has evolved and today you may be capturing much more creative images than one could 40 years ago, but the issue of colour print permanance has not evolved in the same way which is quite disturbing.
BTW I do not buy into all the claims being made on colour permanace, I make RA4 and Inkjet and have seen for myself the limitations of each process.

I find there are several reasons for the wishes of people today. Perhaps my view is determined from where I live & the clients I attract, culture, income, age of clients and other ingredients.

Brides today get information from various sources including, friends, magazines, movies, T.V., the internet and, I believe to a lesser degree, family including relatives. Religion can be a factor but I find less so amongst people who hire me.

Brides want to look beautiful. They get the idea/concept of beautiful images from the sources I mentioned in the above paragraph. They see very few, if any, of the photos mentioned in the first two posts, other than what parents or grandparents may have. They think the photos look stiff, unnatural and not a part of what they want to see of themselves. Whatever I think or you for that matter, in business if you're trying to earn a living in the photography profession, beauty is in the eye of the person who has the checkbook. If you want to stick to principles/art be prepared to work hard finding potential clients who share your vision or have a day job to support yourself.

Attitudes have changed. Technology has allowed it as back in the 1950's when I started in photography I couldn't make photos like I can today.

I make photos with more of a style clients want but I still use classical portrait principles that my mentor & coach Monte Zucker taught me.

Telling someone to look happy is quite different than catching them when emotions peak and they show it and want to see their wedding day as a happy day, full of little emotional blips that they want captured with photography. I advocate group photos as well. You are correct that they are important but the others are important to the client.

These people, my clients, generally, are not actors. Acting is difficult. That's why I capture them when they are happy because it won't look the same as if you tell them to look happy.

That's why I love the wedding photography business. So much variety within each wedding and each wedding is a unique event as the people react in so many different ways.

 

[Bob Carnie]

On a side note,
I remember a guy by the name of Rocky Gunn who for his time was quite unique. His style reminds me of a lot of the work I see today.
He had a crew that basically worked with him from wedding to wedding, There were the technical assistants that would take the family groups, and cover the basic story with precision , and then Rocky would roll in with a couple of assistants for an hour or two max and shoot the creatives with the bride and groom, He was very popular and charged large.
I always wonder what happened to him.

 

[dpurdy]

I find if I dictate my own terms I don't get any work. I did my first couple of D weddings this year because it is what everyone wants. Images on disk. If you shoot that way you might as well keep banging as fast as your flash will recycle, of course a lot of wedding photography is being aware of what is going on where and watching for important moments. I visited a previous client last week for whom I had shot all black and white and done all the prints myself. She had just returned from getting them all scanned and was creating slide shows for digital picture frames. That is what the parents wanted. The prints go in a drawer and all viewing is done on some sort of monitor.
Dennis

 

[lns]

I have 8x10 photos from both of my grand parent's weddings. In each case, There's a photo of the bride and a photo of the couple. They look like contact prints. They are very well done, and the prints look great, with no signs of deterioration, even though they were produced in the 1920s. So, my question is, why isn't that enough? Isn't a couple of well done photos worth more than a trunk of hundreds of so-so ones?

Yes, it's enough, strictly speaking. But you must be an only child of only children. My parents married in the 1940s, and they have the same two beautiful 8x10 prints you describe. Well, they have 4 children and 9 grandchildren (and counting). The negatives of course will be unobtainable, so there are no reprints possible. So it might be nice if they had a few extra wedding photographs after all.

-Laura

 

[bsdunek]

I agree with the trend of this thread - I'm appalled that a photographer will take 1000 or more photos at a wedding and get the results I have seen (In some cases, there are good guys out there). See a similar thread I started at: (there was a url link here which no longer exists) See my note on page 6.

 

[Slixtiesix]

Same here.
I would prefer a handful of really beautiful pictures to a ton of trash.
Regards, Benjamin

 

[AmandaTom]

A friend of my husband is getting married next September and has asked me to bring my camera (he has asked my husband to be the tripod), thinking that I will take some nice shots since he has bought some of my work. This fills me with dread because I don't shoot people, and the shots he bought off me are night landscapes.

My parents were married in 1954 and had just a few pictures taken, of which there were maybe 10 prints. All of them burned in a house fire 4 years ago. Turns out I have some of the negatives by an odd twist of fate. When I was married in 1987, the photographer gave me the 5 rolls he took and I had them developed. Then the negatives went missing for 13 years. When they finally showed up again I had no interest in them anymore (I was so much younger and thinner it was depressing).

Makes me wonder whether these pictures really matter that much in the years following the wedding (after the first year or two--or until the new subject, grandchild, comes along). They seem to have the most value to the generations that follow. In the end, a couple of good black and whites is all I want (but in my case I do not have, unless I print from the color negs).

The photographer at my niece's wedding (in India) took some 2000 images and posted the whole lot online to troll through. Sixteen pictures of a little kid, each just slightly different than the last. Ugh! When I complained I was told, "but people want to look at all the possibilities." Then whittle that 16 down to 4--you're the photographer, use your judgment! Needless to say, I didn't manage to get through them all; I lost interest at about page 10.

 

[perkeleellinen]

I once read an article by Andrew Brown and in it he argued that weddings have grown in excess as they've become more divorced of church and God. He hypothesised that spending thousands on a wedding was the new way of saying "I do" in front of God. The Lord is no longer the witness, but the bank manager and the general excess has replaced the divine.

 

[Mike1234]

^^^ Agreed... just as Christmas is all about "stuff" and it's true meaning is greatly smothered/stifled with commercialism so has everything else. We Americans are a shallow greedy lot who put far too much emphasis on "stuff" and not enough on what really matters. With regard to marriage, we want what we want and our partner wants what she wants... but there is no "middle ground" at which we meet. It's all about "me". So... spendy commercialism it is... make the wedding a gala worth remembering because... it's all downhill from there.

But... the OP is talking about "quality of work" not "quality of life". Personally, I think one affects the other in a greatly deeper way than "fiscal expenditures".

 

[msage]

Interesting thread. I have been the wedding photography biz for 34 years. When I started, 60-90 exposure where the norm. It grew to 200+ in the 1990's for a big wedding and exploded to 250 (very small wedding) to 1,300 (big wedding, big wedding party & 2-3 shooters). Things change and expectations change. Brides and family members want more family photos, they want photos with extended family, photos with friends, more of the wedding party, more of the guys, more locations and so on. (Granted there are couples who want bare bones or no professionally done photos at all). The thing that happens is that couple runs out of energy and time before half way though the day to do all the things they "think" they want! I really talk to couples before I agree to shoot their wedding. We discuss realistically what they want and what we can do. Many couples thank me later. I asked one bride, with all of her different locations and list of 900+ list of shots she wanted, is this a wedding or a photo shoot! The groom thanked me later.
That said, I love weddings! The emotion, commitment and love (or the promise of) always touches me!
Michael

 

[Ian David]

I think weddings have become a bit like children's birthday parties. When I was a kid, the parties were pretty simple affairs. Some sausage rolls and cake and soft drink and a few games like pass-the-parcel. Now the parties seem to involve bouncy castles and live entertainers (clowns, face painters, etc). Everyone is much wealthier now, and a sort of arms race has developed between the parents of all the little darlings.
After attending a few weddings where the bride and groom disappeared with the photographer for hours (literally!), my wife and I told our photographer that she had 15 minutes to get a handful of good photos of the two of us alone. As a result, we have a small album of photos that we are very happy with, and we got to spend more time with our wedding guests. Seems to me that the wedding day is important, but the really important thing is the rest of your life together afterwards. Perhaps with the increasing impermanence of marriage, people are getting more obsessed about the the big day itself...
Ian

 

[perkeleellinen]

No photographer at all at our wedding, no guests either come to think of it. Just two witnesses, registry office, 3 minutes later, done. Over the road for pizza and a few beers and then the bus home.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Perhaps with the increasing impermanence of marriage, people are getting more obsessed about the the big day itself...
Ian

I wonder what happens to the old albums?

Tom

 

[removed account4]

I wonder what happens to the old albums?

Tom

they become coffee table books made by the commercial labs.

 

[Ian David]

No photographer at all at our wedding, no guests either come to think of it. Just two witnesses, registry office, 3 minutes later, done. Over the road for pizza and a few beers and then the bus home.

Nice. I was lobbying for a similar approach to my wedding too. In the end I was outvoted

 

[Mike1234]

The emphasis is on "quantity" rather than "quality"... it's all about having more stuff even if the "stuff" sucks. I have more crappy "stuff" than you have. My big elaborate house may be falling apart but it's still bigger than your house that stands the tests of time. My car may cost $10K/year just to keep the POS running but it cost more than your car. Mine is bigger than yours. My daddy can beat up your daddy. Ehh... I'm sick to death of the whole mess.

And being "outvoted"... means being a wuss. I choose to live without rather than have it cut off. These "new age" women will find themselves alone with their vibrators and missing their rights to motherly love rather than most of us men giving in to being neutered.

 

[Cliffy13]

When I started wedding photography I went out with a Bronica SQB and between 4 and 6 rolls of 120 film on which you had to get everything nd if the client asked for more shots there was an extra cost,I am not decrying digital and the ability to take many more shots does give the customer more choice at no extra cost especially as they get the proofs on DVD rather than prints.However there is a difference between taking a larger number of good shots and the scattergun approach that seems tpo be prevelant today,I have heard of photographers taking thousands of shots at a wedding and surely this cannot be giving the customer well thought out well composed images

 

[Tom Kershaw]

I have heard of photographers taking thousands of shots at a wedding and surely this cannot be giving the customer well thought out well composed images

Little thought can have been attributed to each image if making thousands of exposures (excepting a wedding "video" done on Super16). And anyway how does one go about making a good edit of thousands of images on an economical basis, assuming the photographer wishes to photograph more than a half dozen weddings each year?

Tom

 

[Ian David]

And being "outvoted"... means being a wuss. I choose to live without rather than have it cut off. These "new age" women will find themselves alone with their vibrators and missing their rights to motherly love rather than most of us men giving in to being neutered.

No, being "outvoted" means that two of us had to make the decision, and my wife felt more strongly that she wanted some guests at the wedding than I felt we needed none. Easy. It is called discussion and compromise. No skin off my nose. You are in danger of sounding like you are ranting, Mike.