What I Have Learnt About Modern Formal Wedding Photography

When I started my Wedding photography business in Swansea, contemporary wedding photography consisted of few formal shots and mainly of informal, un-posed shots. This seems only to have become more prominent in the last few years. I must admit, I as a wedding photographer prefer to create documentary style photographs but I also understand the importance of group/formal shots in modern wedding photography. Here are a few things I’ve learnt about group shots along the way.

Group wedding photographs are always a huge challenge as you have to be able to raise your voice and organise large crowds of people. For a wedding which has a large number of guests it’s a good idea to find a high vantage point to get the whole wedding party in the shot. Being up high means you don’t have to worry about any taller or shorter guests as the perspective of the image should solve any problems like that. Also I as a wedding photographer have found that being up high and looking down at everyone helps create authority and gets everyone’s attention. I’ve found that most wedding venues in Swansea usually have a good high vantage point, but if they don’t just a slight elevation on a few steps or wall will do the trick.

I still find it quite difficult to hold the attention of wedding guests and bring the right people together, so a simple technique I have been using at a few weddings in Swansea is to ask the bride & groom to write a list of all the group shots and what guests are to appear in them and then find a loud guest (usually the best man or an usher) to read them out. This really helps me as a wedding photographer and relieves a bit of tension and stress at the height of the wedding day.

One last thing I have learnt about formal wedding photography is to always take several shots of the same thing as this will help minimise the chance of capturing someone blinking or looking away. That said, don’t worry too much as it’s great to capture interaction between guests such as laughing, even in the most formal of shots!

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Wedding Photography Business On The Road

Only a month now until I return to Swansea in the midst of the wedding season. But before I go home to Swansea I’ll be travelling around the East coast of Australia in a campervan, which I’m extremely excited about. But how am I going to keep track of my wedding photography business while on the road? While in New Zealand I realised the difficulties in staying on top of my blog, emails etc. when WiFi is hard to come by and your sleeping in a tent every night! And being a photographer I naturally worried about running out of memory cards. But I found little solutions to all of my problems.

The main problem for me was not being able to access my emails regularly. What if I had wedding enquiries waiting in my inbox. It doesn’t look great if a wedding photographer fails to reply to a wedding enquiry within a couple of days. For example,a few weeks ago I had returned to civilisation after 5 days canoeing down a river in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception let alone 3G or WiFi! As soon as I was able to access my emails there was a wedding enquiry waiting in my inbox. I looked at the date I received it and typically it was the very instant I jumped in the canoe and headed into no-mans-land, sods law. So the email had been waiting around for 5 days, and it turned out to be no problem but I don’t like making clients wait.

What can a travelling wedding photographer do to hunt down the internet? I found it was a great excuse to suggest McDonalds for lunch, as they provide free WiFi, Starbucks offer the same thing so if your after a caffeine hit then that’s also a good choice and a chance to catch up with wedding emails and your wedding photography blog. But while traveling I found myself being very economical with my money and also quite sick of burgers and coffee. Then I figured out that most libraries and museums offer free WiFi AND free admission. Problem solved. The only downside is that you usually need to be in a city or town to come across Mcdonalds, Starbucks, libraries or museums and in New Zealand each town and city is seperated by hundreds of Kilometres of mountains, lakes, rivers and open empty land. Luckily, anybody who has been in touch with me about my wedding photography services has been very understanding and happy to wait until I return to Swansea to meet up and discuss their plans.

Backing up images on the road can be a major concern for many traveling photographers, luckily I’d brought a big enough memory card with me so it wasn’t too much of a problem, but it’s always good to back your images up anyway and I regret not taking a laptop with me to do so. Any wedding photographer reading this who’s planning a similar trip, I’d advise you to take a laptop as it’s essential for backing up your files! A great way for backing up files is by using dropbox. you can install it onto your computer and phone and access images wherever you are. In my case I only had it on my phone which wasn’t much use for backing up new images from my camera.

I lived and I learnt.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Street Photography Influencing Wedding Photography

It’s been a while now since I’ve taken my camera to the streets and engaged in what got me into photography in the first place, street photography. While travelling I’ve started to miss street photography and vowed to get back into it sometime in the near future. I noticed, while looking back at old photography work, how much all those years taking street photographs for my degree in Swansea University helped me become a wedding photographer.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with street photography, it’s a genre of photography which has been around since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a type of documentary photography which features subjects, often people, in candid situations around cities and suburban areas. Street photographs often come in sets, telling a story of a particular place at a particular time.

I used to spend a lot of time taking street photographs in London. I would stand, with my camera, on a busy high street and try to blend in with the moving crowd while anticipating what my next shot would be. This technique has helped me in a huge way with wedding photography. It’s helped me master the art of unobtrusive photography which is what many people want at their wedding. I can photograph wedding guests without them feeling like they have a camera lens following them around all day. I can become a ghost and capture natural expressions on peoples faces as they enjoy the celebrations. This form of wedding photography helps me capture the day in images that tell the story well, and what’s more is that I enjoy the creativity in making these kinds of images, it’s not just about making sure I achieve the standard shots expected of a wedding photographer. If the photographer doesn’t enjoy making the images, the audience won ‘t enjoy viewing them.

Street Photography Influencing Wedding Photography

Something else I’ve learned from being a street photographer is that I can get the results I want from using very little equipment. It’s well known in the photography world that street photographers use little more than a portable camera to attain their photographs. usually a small 35mm or rangefinder camera is suffice. What’s more necessary is large groups of people as your subject, that is why I often went to London to work with huge crowds rather than staying in Swansea. For my wedding photography I use a Canon 450 DSLR with a 17-85mm lens and a flashgun. I feel that if I turned up to a wedding with numerous lighting umbrellas and countless flash bulbs I could no longer carry out the unobtrusive photography I enjoy. I will sometimes use a zoom lens to achieve shots during the wedding ceremony but I find images are much more successful when I am close to the subject. Robert Capa, A photographer I admire, once said “If your photographs aren’t good enough, then you’re not close enough”.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Melbourne A Wedding Photographers Paradise

So, we all know that Paris is the city of love, but the city of Melbourne in Australia must be the city of marriage. I’ve recently spent a week in Melbourne and was shocked at the number of weddings I encountered every day. I couldn’t walk round a street corner without seeing a couple of newlyweds followed by a wedding photographer who was also being followed by a team of assistants, second shooters and umbrella holders.

I was visiting Melbourne as a tourist but I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of taking my wedding photography business there. Don’t get me wrong I love Swansea, it’s where I grew up and always feel at home there, also I have a huge knowledge of the place which really helps when your a wedding photographer, but Melbourne, great city! I went there with few preconceptions so I took everything in with awe and excitement. My camera shutter also had a pretty tough time.

What I loved about the city was the blend of Victorian, Edwardian and modern buildings. Everything just fitted together perfectly and nothing looked out of place. From afar the city looked like a modern metropolis with skyscrapers reaching the clouds but nothing ever felt claustrophobic or over populated. In fact it was possible to walk from one side of the CBD to the other in about 20 minutes so it isn’t even that big. This was great for any bride & groom to skim round their favourite parts of the city with their wedding photographer and get some fantastic shots.

Whereas in Swansea people tend to travel out of the city to places like the Gower Peninsular for their wedding photographs, (and I don’t blame them as the Gower Peninsular is perfect for wedding photography) Melburnians would be crazy to leave the city if that’s where they are getting married.

Something else I noticed while staying there is that the city caters extremely well for young, creative types. There are even countless lanes running straight through the centre of town which are reserved for graffiti artists. These lanes proved a hot spot for wedding photographers, and I can see why. One couple who had just tied the knot were standing in a 1950′s convertible being photographed against a backdrop of some of the most impressive street art I’ve ever seen. Imagine how cool that would look in your wedding photography album!?

OK, rant over. I think you’ve probably guessed I was impressed with Melbourne. Anyone in Swansea looking to get married abroad, ditch the beach wedding or hilltop marquee, head to Melbourne, and take me with you.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Not all travel photography has to be spontaneous or un-staged. While away I’m hoping to meet people, find out what they do, where they are going and why they are going there, and at the same time create photographs which attempt to capture part of their story, so in doing so I’m almost creating staged portraits of people, but it’s not always necessary to distance yourself from the subject. I’m a documentary photographer at heart so telling stories is what I aim for.

My Journey starts in Malaysia and Thailand. Something I think I can really learn from taking photographs in these places is how to deal with a frequent change in light. The Weather this time of year is very hot and sunny but can be unpredictable and cloud over without warning. While our weather in Swansea seems to lack the hot and sunny part it is unpredictable and trying to stay on top of the light situation is a hard part of being a wedding photographer.

One last thing that I thought I might learn from this trip is how to be flexible with little equipment. I’m just taking one camera with one short 17-85 lens. I always feel that while at weddings, changing lens and switching equipment results in me missing particular shots. Not being able to take much equipment on this trip with me means I will learn to be more flexible with less equipment.

I’ve made a few points here on what I think I might learn while travelling but I hope there will be much more to learn and help me develop my wedding photography.

p.s. I will be back in Swansea for the summer season so anyone looking to book me as their wedding photographer, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Ninth in a series of tips covering how to choose your wedding photographer I discuss the importance discussing your wedding photography album.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

No matter how hard we try I don’t believe we will ever successfully recreate the look of film with digital. A huge part of digital wedding photography is post processing images and a large part of post processing is trying to make digital images look like film prints. I can’t quite describe the difference between a digital image and a film print, but I know it’s there. With film cameras coming back into fashion in a big way I believe that maybe offering film photography as a wedding photography service would benefit me. The one big drawback, though, is the cost. Every film you use costs money. Every film you develop costs money, and the facilities you need to develop and print cost money. But could this wedding photography service help differentiate me from my competitors and make me money as a result?

Another possible benefit of returning to film is that it would help develop my skills as a wedding photographer. I don’t think that any photographer has learnt everything there is to know about exposure. Because film camera’s cannot compensate for under or over exposures, you would learn a lot by using one if only for a short time before returning to digital.

Let’s be honest, photography is an expensive hobby/profession. Digital photography is progressing at a phenomenal rate and the top of the range, professional cameras seem to always be just out of reach. If you were to return to film then you could afford to invest in professional equipment at low prices. take a look on ebay or a local second hand camera shop and your sure to find a few classics like a Leica or a Hasselblad.

Whether or not I will try my hand at film again I don’t know, but I’m always thinking of ways to stand apart from my competitors and as far as I know there are no other wedding photographers in Swansea using film photography.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Wedding Photo in Swansea Marina

As the winter rolls in, (and it’s definitely rolling in) I’ve been looking at ways I can improve on my wedding photography services for summer 2012. For a while now I’ve been considering offering a ‘pre-wedding’ or ‘engagement’ shoot as an additional service. It is something that has become more and more popular in recent years. The reason I think it will benefit me as a wedding photographer is that it allows me to further build rapport with my customers which can only strengthen the cooperation required on the wedding day. It’s also very important to suss out how the bride and groom to be behave in front of the camera, and in return how I should behave with them. To put it simply, this session gives me time to practice photographing the couple, as every couple is different.

I think all wedding photographers know that that the actual wedding day is a great opportunity to gain business through referrals. So if the couple already have a set of pictures to rave about then your going to greatly increase your chances of a referral or two.

So, what locations in Swansea are good for a pre-wedding shoot?

- Swansea isn’t exactly short on parks. We have Singleton park, Clyne gardens, Cwmdonkin park, Bryn Mill park and so on. The great thing about using parks for a pre wedding shoot is that they are easy to stroll through due to paths, lanes and little tracks. A disadvantage is that they can be busy which may result in it being difficult to obtain shots with empty backgrounds.

- Swansea is also home to a beautiful Marina, where couples can look out to see, stroll on the beach, explore the fishing boats and cross the bridges, but wind can be a problem as it makes it impossible to control long hair.

- If you require a peaceful and unpopulated area then Swansea’s Gower Peninsular is perfect. It may be a bit of a drive out of Swansea but once you’re there you have numerous picturesque landmarks at hand to enhance the pre-wedding photographs.

- Don’t forget that built up and urban areas can look fantastic in photographs. It may require a wedding photographer with experience in photographing urban areas, and, (without bragging too much) I was a street photographer for four years before going into wedding photography.

Anyone who follows my blog and is considering getting in touch for a 2012 wedding, don’t hesitate to ask about my pre-wedding shoot services.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

Everyone Is A Wedding Photographer

Since photographing weddings in and around Swansea I’ve noticed how well weddings are documented. Every guest has a camera and flashes are going off like there’s no tomorrow. In fact I think it would be really good to look through all the guests’ wedding photographs as I think there would be loads of great images. I think it would be good for my development as a wedding photographer to see another perspective on the wedding day. What does the guest see? How does the guest take pictures? After discussing wedding photography with a guest at a recent wedding in Swansea Registry office I was asked for some pointers. Here they are….

Always consider the light you are working with. It’s easy to forget the one thing that makes photography possible, but if the lights not right then neither will the photograph be. If you can try and photograph the subject where light is only coming from one direction. If you are outside try not to photograph the subjects with bright sunlight directly on their face as this causes them to squint and can also result in overexposed images. try look for some shade if it’s too bright, shadows can really enhance an image. even when in a shaded area try to avoid using on camera flash. The types of flash that are standard with modern compact digital camera’s are terrible, modern cameras can compensate for the low light conditions well enough. If the auto mode does struggle to get the correct exposure just switch to manual and increase the ISO setting slightly.

One thing I’ve found with a lot of guests’ wedding photography is that they stand too far back from the subject resulting in unwanted elements in the background and too much space in the frame. If you want to create space in your image make sure you think about the composition and what you want to include in the image. Look for a clean background like some trees or grass or a nice part of a building. I’ve noticed during my time as a wedding photographer that no matter how nice the wedding venue you need to think about where you point your camera as unpleasant backgrounds can crop up anywhere, for example car parks, bins etc.

One of the most important things for my wedding photography is to ensure I interact with guests as I photograph them. this results in natural photographs which have much more emotional aesthetic, rather than saying ‘smile’ and getting an image of people looking afraid to move.

While editing some wedding photographs from my last wedding at Swansea registry office I had a final set of around 150 images. this was narrowed down from thousands. While you may feel it’s hard to get rid of some your shots it’s an essential part of editing your wedding photography and results in a more coherent and impressive set of images. As digital photography allows you to shoot away to your hearts content it means you get lots of shots of the same thing. This is boring and repetitive when viewing them after the wedding. So pick out the best, put them in an order which works and enjoy your very own concise and varied wedding album!

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.

As a wedding photographer I am still finding the balance between documenting the day as well as possible and at the same time shooting a story which is sensitive to the guests in the photographs. Nothing annoys me more than seeing paparazzi photographers invading personal space, so I try to disassociate myself with them as much as possible.

The best way to judge if a photograph should be taken is to ask yourself : would the married couple or family want to remember this moment? From experience of being at weddings I know that people get emotional but if it goes further than a few happy tears then it’s time to turn the camera away. If someone has a drunken fall on the dance floor and people are having a giggle then shoot away but if someone is actually hurt then it’s probably not the best idea to photograph the situation. You don’t want people to be saying ‘remember that wedding photographer who was taking pictures of uncle Paul’s fall’? It’s bad press for you as a wedding photographer and won’t get you any business through word of mouth.

I once heard of a wedding where the fire alarm went off so all the guests had to evacuate and wait outside for the fire brigade to arrive. Something like this can put the day completely off schedule. Wedding plans rarely leave time for massive inconveniences like this. To make things worse they were right in the middle of tucking into their wedding breakfast. The wedding photographer managed to get some great photographs of the bride laughing with the fire crew, and this would give the wedding photographs some character and personality. Whether it’s a moment they want to cherish or not is another matter. This example just proves that it’s really hard to tell where the line is.

If I’m really unsure whether to shoot it, I shoot it anyway. The beauty of photography is that you can always delete it afterwards or choose not to include it in the final set of wedding images. While the married couple should have a say in what images are included anyway, I feel it is part of a wedding photographers job to be able to choose the images which work best together.

So, if in doubt, shoot.

My name is Luke Stanton and I’m a qualified wedding photographer based in Swansea, South Wales. Find our more about my Swansea wedding photographer services.