I was just talking this morning with a colleague wedding photographer on an aspect of photography for which I spend a lot of energies: bokeh, that is, defocus in front and behind the subject.
I told him how much money I spent in searching for materials suitable for this kind of photography and also the kind of professional flash I chose, the Profoto B1, to be able to create outdoor portraits with perfect lighting and blur effect behind the subject.
While I was all captured by these stories and I was almost thrilled to tell the prodigies of these fantastic equipment he says to me: many of you are very attracted to this kind of photography while I prefer photographs with a very wide depth of field. In photographic slang, the depth of field is the same as the focus area. The smaller depth of the field is the smaller the blur part will be.
By the fact that I had a new enlightenment: everyone has his tastes and accordingly will have his clients. But is not it great?
Maybe this is too little to define a photo style, but it is still part of us and our tastes. I’m sure couples will not stop to look at the photos in technical and analytical terms, but in watching them they will perceive and choose the photographer they like most.
Marco, (so he is called my colleague) has found in his taste his style, as well as I in both of us and we are proposing to the marriage market. We will surely meet different people and we can satisfy those customers who meet our taste.
I find this a fantastic thing, each of us is different so every couple of spouses will find her wedding photographer. In an ideal world this would be the only reason to make the choice. Unfortunately, today, there are other factors too, linked to communication factors, price and album proposals, much less romantic elements than I like to interpret my work.
So I would like to conclude by giving advice to future wedding couples, choose the photographer you prefer for the images you produce, not for price, sympathy or album type; they are all a bit of a matter in comparison to the quality of photography. The sympathetic photographer will not stay with you forever, photographs yes. The money you save will not stay with you all the life, the photographs do. The album on which you print the photos is a container, what matters is the content!
