I decided to take a risk and step out of my comfort zone and allow my work to be thoroughly critiqued by some of the nation’s top photojournalism wedding photographers. While I am great at posing people and great at directing and capturing those moments, I wanted to improve my ability to tell the story of the wedding day in a documentary style that is similar to images you see in newspapers. I am pretty good at capturing moments, too, but I want to get better at anticipating them, as every photographer does.
I also wanted to learn from some top pulitzer-prize-winning photographers and get their take on how to incorporate newspaper-style photography into my style. I also wanted to push myself harder than ever before, and shoot in some styles that I am not usually comfortable with in order to gain from this week-long experience.
Here’s the problem sometimes with photojournalism – sometimes you don’t get people looking their best OR there are things in the background that are distracting. So, you have to weigh ‘do I capture the emotion’ or ‘do I spend a little more time framing the image to make it look pretty or making the subject look pretty’. This is a hard concept for me to deal with because I am all about making my clients look beautiful, so I am learning that sometimes emotion does overrule how a client looks IF the client wants truly candid moments captured.
My assignment was to follow a mother who is a bi-vocational minister. She’s a stay-at-home mom of 2 children and a minister. She’s definitely a busy person, and I observed her for 2 days straight with a small number of breaks (much harder than a wedding). Every night, I would return to the ‘homebase’ to get my work critiqued and EVERY image was critiqued – even the bad ones. My assignment was to capture images that tells her story, and in the end, we had to filter out many images down to 12 (much harder than selecting images for a wedding album). This was a lot of work to just create 12 images. I truly felt like I was working for a newspaper and trying to get ‘the story’. We also had ‘newspaper’ rules placed on us – you had to crop in the camera and no post-processing of images. Sometimes I capture the image, and I crop it later because the moment is happening right then, for example.
This experience was new to me. Weddings are somewhat predictable, and you have a good idea on how the schedule is going to go. I had NO idea at all how this schedule was going to go, and I had to quickly adapt to various environments. Tyler Wirken of Wirken Photography was my mentor and he did an awesome job of critique. I had a tough time at first because I spent a great deal of time taking ‘pretty images’ instead of capturing ones that told the story. This is always a tough call in a wedding day, because you want to take images that are artistic, and you want to take images that are photojournalistic, and it’s a risk that I always have to figure out of ‘how many to take of what’.
I went to some new extremes that I never have been before, such as using all kinds of new lenses (a very wide 16-35 f/2.8 for most of the time on my Canon 5D, and a 24 f/1.4 for a VERY low-light candle-lit church ceremony), and I chose to go the entire time without flash, which was also new for me. I usually use my long lens (70-200 f/2.8) to capture moments instead of being VERY close to people with using wide lenses. I had to force myself into the story by getting very close and personal. I had to break that ‘personal space’ barrier sometimes to really capture the moment.
Her 2 children were very young and full of spirit. Photographing young children and NOT controlling them was tough. I have photographed children before, but you usually can control or ‘bribe’ them to do what you want. I will admit that I talked with them a little, but I wanted to capture them in their natural environment.
I also chose to not interact with my environment at all, such as ignoring the temptation of turning lights on/off for better lighting, closing window shades, having people move to get better light, etc. I don’t do this for weddings (I do control the external environment if possible and if time permits).
I will post a link to the slideshow shortly.
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