Tag Archives: documentary wedding photography tips

Always be on your feet.

A documentary wedding photographer cannot afford to be lazy. It will defeat the purpose of being one in the first place and more than that, you will not be able to pull off all of the shots that you need to pull off if you are not on your feet and moving around all of the time. This is the reason why wearing comfortable shoes should be a top priority for you if you want to be a really efficient documentary wedding photographer in all of your shoots. When you are at a shoot, you don’t really have that much control over what is going on. You will need to be in the moment and to live in the moment all throughout the time that you are there and out and about.

Change up your positions and the angles that you are going for every now and then.

This will ensure that you always have something going on in the background one way or the other. You will need to produce a lot of variations in your shots when you are trying to become a documentary wedding photographer because this will ensure that you always have something to help you pull things through the entire time that you are there and shooting the wedding.

Anticipate the moments before they happen.

This is simply being able to think on your feet all of the time and having a fairly good working knowledge of the sequence of events. This is something that you can check out with the bride or with the wedding planner, if the clients managed to hire one. Make it a point to constantly be on the lookout for the moments before they actually pan out. This way, you will be in all of the right spots or positions so that you turn out to be capable enough to take the shots that you need to shots. Documentary wedding photography is all about natural looking photos that are being taken in the moment, almost to the point of looking candid and taken as if the subjects don’t really know anything about it. You need to take the shots when your subjects are getting a little distracted or when they are getting caught up in the moment. Eventually, you will be able to get a good feel for things like these. You might start up pretty slow but you will eventually be able to pick up speed one way or the other.

Know the sequence

As a documentary wedding photographer, you should get to know the wedding sequence like the back of your hand. There will always be a sequence out there one way or the other. You should always aim to get a hold of the sequence as a documentary wedding photographer. This is the kind of thing that you will need to watch out for and to constantly search out for at the end of the day. This is what you should always be checking out one way or the other. List the sequence down if you can. Getting things down on paper will always turn out to be different and so much easier for you to follow through with things so always get things checked out in advance.

It takes a lot of hard work.

Being a wedding photographer with a documentary photography style may sound like something that is fairly free flowing and something that will allow you a lot of artistic and creative control over things but there is actually so much more to it than what you see at face value or than what you understand out of sheer context. It takes a lot of hard work to be a professional documentary wedding photographer. Even some traditional wedding photographers out there are having a hard time trying to grasp this particular concept and trying to keep up with the changes of the times. This is because there are a lot of huge differences in the tasks at hand and in the workload that a documentary wedding photographer has compared what the usual wedding photographers cover for.

Keep moving and keep up with the moments.

For one, a documentary wedding photographer needs to make sure that he is always able to keep moving and keep up with the moments as they happen. There are some planned poses and scenes but the majority of the pictures that are being taken by a documentary wedding photographer are pretty much candid and unplanned. This puts a huge amount of stress on you as the documentary wedding photographer given that you will be expected to be always in position and always angled right every singe time. You ought to have a certain knack for being able to always position yourself right or you end up missing out on a lot of important or crucial moments during the wedding. Wear a great pair of shoes that will be able to keep up with all of your movements. You need to be able to run, craw, or scoot if you have to just in pursuit of all of the right angles and all of the right shots and the kind of shoes that you are able to wear in the process is something that can really greatly affect that when it all comes down to it.

As a wedding photographer who would like to specialize in the documentary style, you really need to make sure that you will be able to anticipate the moments as they happen. This means that you have to be extra sensitive with what is going on around you and intercept the events right when they are about to happen so that you can poise yourself and go ahead and take the shots.

Check out the body language of your subjects as well as of the people around you.

There are a lot of indicative signs of when important moments are about to happen and you need to be well aware of those things. One particular example is when say, a groom busts out a surprise intermission dance program mob style. You need to read the signs ahead of time such as the groomsmen nudging each other, or the groom signaling to the DJ to start the music, and the like. The moment that you miss out on reading something, the moment is gone forever and there is no way for you to rewind it and to go back.