Every wedding photographer will have a different approach. All these approaches are respectable. Photograph perfection or its ups and downs? Focus on the couple or on the whole group? Stage or let it be? There are a thousand ways to approach a wedding day for photographers as well as for the bride and groom.
Among all these approaches, let me tell you about mine, to make sure you are in the same state of mind. A wedding, for me, is a family reunion. It’s a day of celebration where we celebrate love and friendship. So it’s not a giant photo shoot!
In my opinion, it is more important to photograph real moments and emotions rather than making things artificial. When you discover the images from my report, I want you to be able to feel again what you felt on your wedding day. And it’s not by asking you to transform into a photo model that we will achieve this!
I don’t want your wedding photos to look like Mr. and Mrs. Everybody’s photos. They must be unique, as much as your wedding was.
Never mind if, during the preparations, your beautiful hotel room is strewn with clothes, suitcases, water bottles, toiletry bags, or shoe boxes!
If I start to remove everything that should be for an Instagrammable photo, I would no longer be observing and I would miss many precious moments! This would make me intrusive and we would all lose spontaneity, while my goal is precisely to make my camera invisible!
I don’t arrive on the morning of the wedding with a list of photos to take. I don’t have a to-do list!
I don’t ask the service providers to change their way of working to fit what I would have wanted. If the makeup artist has placed you next to the window, preventing me from moving around you, too bad! It’s up to me to find the best way to tell this story with the conditions I have! Constraint is a great creativity booster!
Photography is by nature a documentary art – AUGSUT SANDER
Being in observation, in reaction, in anticipation of what is happening before my eyes, is the only way to be creative and to propose a report as moving as possible and as close to what you have experienced.
A wedding day is a few iconic and official moments such as, for example, the exchange of rings or the opening of the dance. But it is also a very large majority of intermediate and apparently secondary moments. Apparently only! Because these are the moments that make my reports alive!
To photograph them and integrate them into your report, I need to be in observation. Not in staging. This observation puts me in a state of hyper-vigilance which allows me to anticipate events and to go for always stronger images!
This mindset also applies to the couple’s photo session. My goal at that moment is to make you forget about the camera.
To capture all these moments and be in this state of creative hyper-vigilance, I must not be isolated and alone in my head. On the contrary! I must be in action! With you! Present, attentive, and available.
This will allow you to forget about the camera. This will allow me to best perceive your feelings and tell your story accurately.
At the beginning of my career as a wedding photographer, I found myself at a very simple wedding, far from the image one might idealize. No wonderful castle in a sublime domain. No grand reception with a magnificent buffet enjoyed at sunset. Instead, a party room adjoining an overheated parking lot, beer, and chips! We are far from Instagram, aren’t we?
That day, I decided to focus on people and their interactions! I photographed the exchanges of looks between a little girl and her grandpa, between the bride and her dad. I decided to photograph the gestures of tenderness and marks of affection, in short, the love that existed between them. It was precious!
That day, I made a promise to always preserve this state of mind.
Lyon - France
+33 (0)7 81 60 32 03
