The basic action of a camera is to take a fleeting slice of time and make it last.
Those moments are meaningful when they say something about the way things are beyond themselves. This slice of time is 1/125th of a second in a hectic, chaotic bedeken, but shows so much about the love of a daughter and father, spread over a lifetime.
Even though it may not always feel like it, wedding photographers have a great deal of autonomy on wedding days, which means one of the core skills of the job are being able to make good decisions very, very quickly.
You might think that first kisses don’t require any thought after we’ve done 1,000+ weddings. Far from it. This is still a split second that encapsulates so many months of planning and kicks off the biggest and most-defining part of life for most people, and a lot can go wrong.
Samantha and Matt’s wedding was amazing and personal in ways I will keep elaborating on in weeks to come, and we’d all been planning for it since before they were even engaged … but at that critical moment? The clouds parted, revealing the Worst Light Ever.
It was the sort of glorious spring sunshine through trees and windowpanes that might seem cheerful if a bit blinding to a layperson, but to a photographer? Well, right after the ceremony, an avid photographer guest asked “how the heck did you shoot in that?”
Answer: I didn’t.
The speed and simplicity of a first kiss removes a lot of choices, but you are still left with things like how close to be, which lens to use, what is your framing … but the most defining one is “which side will you shoot?”
In a vacuum, I would love to always try to photograph a first kiss from the back for a simple reason … it means that the background to the shot are the people that the couple loved enough to invite to their wedding.
But each decision is made in context. Shooting from behind is risky because you never quite know if people will get in front of your camera, and in many scenarios both getting and being there can feel very obtrusive. Moreover, even when it is the best position for that moment, it definitely puts you way out of position for all of the amazing moments that can happen right afterward, from first joyful glances to the recession.
This is why it is so fantastic to be a two-person team who trust each other completely. In those few seconds, we know that either of us can get the better angle for the first kiss and the other can piece their ways through the latticework of shadows to capture all the first post-ceremony moments. Partnership allows you to both cover your bases and take necessary risks at the same time.
(more tech info and the ”bad light” photo at patreon.com/thebrenizers)
When taking, choosing, and editing photos, there is usually some sort of battle between the photographer in us and the human in us … and at least in weddings the human should often in the battles.
This isn’t even the cleanest composition that we took in that one-minute period … but it’s the one that makes me tear up as I look at it, and we think that is more important.
One of the clearest surprises when we looked through our own wedding photos was that things we might have thought of as clutter when looking at someone else’s photos were extremely interesting and important when we knew all the people. To you, the people on the left are blobs — to the bride, they are some of the most important people in her life.
But it’s Mom’s expression that gets me, and speaks to another lesson in empathy we’ve had in recent years.
Parenthood? Woah.
Being a Dad is about as hard as I thought being a Mom would be. And motherhood is a physical and emotional endurance course like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Weddings are important enough to hire a photographer for not just because you dress nice and bought flowers, but because of the lifetimes of relationships they represent, before and after the day. I don’t know what it was like to raise and care and know Matthew the way a Mom would … but for a split-second I get a glimpse.
From an Austin wedding — everyone is more flexible in Texas?
Patreon stuff below: Feel free to read or feel free to ignore and just enjoy this awesome image from Tatiana!
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In 2014 I developed a lecture on how to stay profitable and happy as a self-directed photographer and businessperson*. I have learned since that the advice was really good, partially because multiple people told me how much it helped them, and partially because it helped *me* every time I followed my own advice, but mostly because every time I *didn’t* take this advice I became less happy in my business and less productive. A/B testing the hard way, if you will.
When I finished all my notes and the development process, I had a really good, complete, six-hour lecture. For a 90-minute speaking slot. I know all too well what Mark Twain meant when he said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.”
I managed to whittle it down, but there’s a lot left to say. Over coming months, I will not only be dispersing each piece of advice from this lecture extended into article form; I will be adding whatever was left on the cutting room floor that shouldn’t have been, and the lessons I’ve learned since then: Both from the times I followed this advice and from the times I didn’t.
Part of what we do is take pictures … but actually clicking the shutter is the small part. Getting and staying motivated to do each part of the job is what keeps us going and truly makes us better. We will be taking that journey over at our Patreon, and are excited to have people take it with us.
(Also our resident Patreon guru Sam Hurd tells us that we should raise our prices on the premium tier, so we might not be at $5/month much past March! Get it while it’s hot, and you can totally blame Sam if you don’t make it in time for the deadline).
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D3s, Sigma 24mm f/1.4 ART @ f/2. 1/250th, ISO 1000
Man we love a tearful first look … we’ve been tempted to add onions to our gear bag. But no vegetables were needed for Mary and Vin; the emotion was palpable the entire day.
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#sonya7III, #sony85mmgm @ f/1.4 1/125th, ISO 800
Recipe for true depth-of-field craziness.
1) Take a photo at f/0.95.
2) Take 95 more photos (or fewer; it’s easy to overdo it for safety with the Sony A9.)
3) #brenizermethod
There’s so much in this moment at Hans and Scott’s Tea ceremony… and so much more to come.
Love is being able to forget the world with each other on a warm summer night.
True love, like Noelle and Francis's, is being able to forget the world on a freaking freezing winter night like this.
A9, 85mm @ f/1.4, 1/200th, ISO 2000
When is a moment more than a moment? When it represents decades into the past and future.
Every time we photograph the little moments that might seem familiar, we keep in mind everything that has led to it. The hug of a father-daughter dance — or many similar moments — is a spark of deep emotion, but also represents all of the time these people imagined it, and all of the time they spent forming their connection.
We are already blown away by the idea that Gavin will be married one day, that we’ll be celebrating his own love story. We are living those moments in different but equally vivid ways as we will when we look back on it later, perusing the photos. Each of these perspectives can infuse so many of the smallest moments of wedding days, one of the many things that keeps them more fresh and exciting for us than ever.
The Mansion at Natirar is one of those places that seem to beautiful and spacious to belong in the crowded outskirts of New York City, in the most-dense state of the Union of New Jersey. But it’s there, with gorgeous grounds and winding roads and all sorts of areas that you would just love to lazily walk around in … that is, if it hadn’t been close to 100 degrees like it was for Eric and Stephanie’s wedding.
Luckily the heat and blazing sun couldn’t keep them down, and it was tears of joy, not sweat, that mostly rolled down their faces. It was one of those first looks that felt like the entire emotional quota of your normal wedding day had been packed into the first five minutes of seeing each other … and it only grew from there, the intimacy punctuated with exultant celebration. It was amazing to see Eric and Stephanie dance with nearly all of their guests, a whirlwind of inclusion and deep connections with everyone there.
I love that all you need to know about Cecilia's grace as a trained dancer is to watch her do … anything.
A fun moment of serendipity and #tbt (I never know what day it is in the off-season) to 9 years, 3 months, 6 days, 17 hours ago.
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D3, 24-70 @ 32mm f/3.2, 1/80th, ISO 1250
Tricks are fun and bokeh beats clutter, but it’s the moment that makes it matter.
Now it's time for "As long a review of the Sony HVL-f45rm flash as a wedding photographer time for in October!"
Good: It's freaking magical -- why is it so tiny, so well-balanced with small Sony cameras, with such little meaningful power difference? If I'm rocking a reception with a big flash at 1/8th power, on the tiny 45rm I'm *maybe* at 1/8th + 1/3rd, a negligible difference. Here it's hitting ISO 100 f/11 at well under full power, balancing the bright sun outside and highlighting how bad-ass Denise is. And it's the best TTL I've ever used, so good that … I even use it occasionally.
The bad: Weirdly fragile, in my experience. We are fairly good to our gear these days, and out of the four Sony flashes we own, four have been to the repair shop for hot shoe issues. Now we pack it as gently as we would a newborn kitten.
One awesome couple, one amazing vineyard after the rain, and a whole lotta frames with an 85mm f/1.4.
I've been playing around with some of the new smartphone tech because I'm still just a photo nerd at heart, and I admit that as artificial depth of field gets better and better through computational photography, I stopped and said "Hm, moving this slider is a lot easier than taking a hundred images and feeding them through a computer." But of course, that's only because of an upshot of the less talked-about side of the smartphone photography revolution: not that most photos are taken on phones, but also that most are viewed on them as well.
I've never truly seen most of the Brenizer Method photos I've delivered. This photo could be printed at 300 dpi at five feet across. I've made those prints and each time I've been surprised: "Oh, *that's* what this photo really looks like!" It's part of the point of also taking the long way around and making things specifically so that they last and go a step beyond what is easy. (Even though I still often use DoF-faking apps for fun and personal creativity. I'd rather play on the lawn than tell the kids to get off it.)
