Wedding photography is one of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of photographing a wedding. Wedding portraits are an important part of any wedding, and the best way to capture the essence of a couple’s special day is through photographs that show emotions. To achieve this, you not only need to have great lighting, good composition, and impeccable photography skills, but there’s so much more you need to do if you want to show genuine emotions in your photographs. There’s nothing like capturing a special moment in time with your camera that will go beyond time and generations for your couple.
Even though which camera or lens you’re shooting with has a huge influence, the key to capturing emotion in a wedding photograph lies within your own heart, mind, and soul.
In this article, I’ll be explaining how you can put emotion in the foreground of your wedding photographs and create something of great value to your clients.
Be around, always
Weddings are organized chaos. That’s both good and bad news. Bad news for the bride because every bride in the world hates chaos, especially on her wedding day. But great news for you. Because in those moments of chaos, if you’re present and looking, that you will strike gold.
If there’s one most important untold secret on how to get genuine, raw emotions in your photos is, it would be to be around, always. Even when you think nothing important is happening. Because most often than not, there’s much more than meets the eye. And you cannot plan or stage emotions.
Get lucky by not depending on luck
Do you believe every great photo you have ever taken was because it was meant to be, or was it because you tried really hard. You took hundreds of bad photos just to arrive at that one great photo? My guess would be the latter.
The thing is, you cannot change or create your luck. But what you can do is to increase your odds of being successful. Let me give you an example of one such lucky photo. I was shooting my couple at one of the wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal. I was lying on the floor, with a perfect composition in my camera, and my friend was blocking people from coming into my frame. Just then, these 4 ladies decided not to listen to him and wanted to walk past right in front of my camera. While my right eye was on the viewfinder, from my left eye, I saw this was about to happen. And immediately I decided to convert this into something good. So while these ladies were passing through, I was already prepared. And at the correct moment, I pressed the shutter and got this:
Trust your eyes
A lot of time, we get too engrossed in technicalities. We try to nail everything right for every photo. The correct setting, the correct lens, good exposure, perfect shutter, ISO etc. While all this is great, always trust your eyes more than the equipment. What you see from your eyes and feel from your heart is something no technology can replicate on its own. The whole point is trying to translate what you see and feel at the wedding, in your photos. And often, the perfect settings would NOT give you that.
Get to Know Your Couple
And I’m not talking about their names or wedding venues. Get to know them at a personal level. Know their hopes and dreams. Know what songs they like. What’s their favourite movie. What connects them to each other. When we’re shooting any wedding at Magica, we always ask our clients first to fill an extended form with all these details and after that, we always meet the couple.
Knowing them personally gives you a unique perspective on what they like and what they don’t. Your job, as a photographer, is to give them closest to what they like while being authentic to your art.
Be Authentic
Which brings me to my next and very important point, be authentic. I know, a lot of us are influenced by social media and try to replicate perfect poses which are tried and tested to get maximum likes. But before doing that, ask yourself, is that really authentic. Is that what you’ll do regardless of count of likes? Are you shooting to impress your fellow photographers or to give memories of a lifetime to your couple who have trusted you for their wedding?
It will take time. Maybe a couple of years. But you’ll find your true authentic self sooner or later. And when you find that, hold onto that. That’s the only thing nobody else will be able to replicate.
Make people comfortable
Have you ever noticed that whenever you point your camera to anyone, their instant reaction is to freeze. That’s really not their fault. We all have evolved and have seen everyone else doing the same and so, we do it too. And there is never a great photo in the history of photography that has come by just pointing the camera on people’s faces. A snapshot, yes. But a good photo takes time. The time that is required for you to make people comfortable with you holding that big lens in front of them. One great hack is to let them know the person (you) who’s behind the camera than just the camera that they’re seeing. Show your face, smile, talk to them and only then you can get them to drop their guard and give you genuine emotions to work with.
Pay Attention To The Emotion of The Eyes
We tend to think that emotions are mostly about faces and tears and smiles, but actually emotions or more about the eyes, than anything else. So always pay attention to your couple’s eyes even in the most bizarre situations, because what they’re feeling inside their head has to reflect from their eyes. That’s where you’ll get your money shot.
Match Your Imagination With Your Photos
A lot and if I can say in most of the time Weddings are always a surprise element. We never know what we can encounter and how things will unfold in a couple’s wedding, but if we take some of the imagination with us on their wedding day, it can help us create even better photos. Photographers always tend to get inspiration from things around them. Keeping a note of those inspirations and imaginations and compiling them in your wedding shoots might give you some photos that are unique
Go close. And then, closer
It is a famous saying in photography that the closer you get, the better the photos will be. I might not agree with it 100%, but it might be true in a lot of situations. Especially when you’re shooting a couple.
Position yourself at the best place and then just wait
Hey, something I have learnt in my wedding photography career: “Motion is the enemy of emotion”
What I mean by that is when you are in a room or a situation where there are many people or even if there are two people if you are constantly moving around to get the perfect frame, you are just getting in the way of a really great emotional picture. So I always do is, I position myself at the perfect place from where I think I would get a clean frame, and then I just wait for things to happen. Following this principle has allowed me to capture shots like these:
Look for candid moments
It’s mostly true that most of the wedding portraits are posed. The couple stands in front of the camera and you make a great picture, but mostly the emotional shorts or candid ones when they are not aware of the Photographer round and were just enjoying the moment. Always pay attention to those moments. Because those are the ones that would give you the most compelling photos.
About the Author:
Rish Agarwal is an award-winning wedding photographer from India with over a decade of experience in doing and teaching wedding photography. He founded Magica for documenting amazing stories of people. Stories that move your heart.
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