Maine wedding photographer, Bruce Plotkin Photography, is featured this week in the my Kate Parker Wedding series, How To Say ‘I Do’: A Ceremony Planning Series. This series will appear every week on my Kate Parker Wedding and will give you a chance to explore the ceremony world a little bit better! This week, Bruce Plotkin shares insight and advice on his experience with photographing wedding ceremonies.
For the past ten years I’ve had the incredible opportunity to photograph wedding ceremonies and celebrations of hundreds of brides of grooms from Maine to New York to the Caribbean. There are some aspects to each of these wedding days that I have a certain amount of control over and others where I’m at the mercy of the environment. The wedding ceremony can certainly fit into this latter category.
Nothing, of course, can be more beautiful than a wedding ceremony by the water at dusk. Take that very same amazing location and have the ceremony take place at high noon on a hot summer day and not only can it be brutal for the bride and groom (and the photographer), but the photographs, of course, will have a totally different feel to them, never mind the couple may be squinting through the entire ceremony. This doesn’t mean that this is inherently the wrong thing to do, having your ceremony at this time of day, but it certainly adds a new challenge to our photos. Add to that the bright summer sun reflecting off the ocean and it only increases the challenge.
Ceremonies in churches, synagogues and other interior locations offer their own set of challenges at times. I’ve shot weddings in some of the most quaint and quintessentially New England little churches, from Block Island to Watch Hill, RI to perhaps the smallest of all, The Talmadge Hill Community Church here in Fairfield County, Ct. And nothing was more charming than the small neighborhood chapel on the island of Antigua, where a local choir was included in the ceremony. But then more often than not we find ourselves in a large and very dark cathedral-like space with little or no available light to work by. Most challenging of all, perhaps, was a wedding we photographed this past year where virtually all of the lights were turned off in the church and the only illumination was the candles being carried by the bridesmaids, which were then used to light the guests candles. An incredibly beautiful and unique ceremony, but truly challenging to capture on camera. Not only was there nothing other than candle light to photograph by, but the priest specifically prohibited the use of any flash during even the processional and recessional. This, of course, illustrates one very strong truth, which is that some of the most difficult lighting situations can be the ones that ultimately photograph the most dramatically. Always a challenge, often worth it.
Finally, it’s not uncommon when a church wedding is planned for a bride or wedding planner to pass on to me a list of rules for photographers, sometimes pretty standard fare, other times with this rather intense and firm tone. My assumption about all of this has always been that they’re reacting to a few bad apples over the years, who’ve come into their beautiful place of worship and not shown the proper respect in either their manner or performance. My approach as a wedding photojournalist is in general to make myself as invisible as possible and never is this more the case than during the wedding ceremony. Not only does it allow me to get my best photos, but it also makes for a much more intimate and soulful experience for the bride and groom. To this day, I’ve never seen a list of church rules that was any more strict than the rules I’ve already placed on myself.
Maine wedding photographer, Bruce Plotkin Photography, is a member of my Kate Parker Wedding your online wedding resource guide geared towards directing couples to quality vendors based on their price range and state.
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