How to Choose Your Professional Wedding Photographer

What is the standard for photography that should be applied to your wedding?

What Is Couture Photography?

Perhaps it's expressed best by celebrity wedding photographer Charles Maring, "Luxury wedding photography... returns to a more nostalgic photojournalistic approach that will tell your inspirational wedding story from start to finish with plenty of style to capture your once-in-lifetime moments."

Agreed. We think of the great, iconic images of weddings before us: Princess Grace of Monaco to Prince Rainier; JFK and Jackie Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island; Princess Diana to the Prince of Wales in Saint Paul's Cathedral, London. All these, among others, yielding classic images, rich in dimension, living on beyond their time. All of them photographed photojournalistically, as they happened, in documented, pure moments.

Not a one of them containing a single, cookie cutter shot.

Denis Reggie is the photographer who has championed "wedding photojournalism" in our time. American Photo magazine named him "one of the top ten photographers in the world", His distinctive, spontaneous images have been featured on the cover of LIFE magazine, and named in "Photographs of the Year" by People, LIFE, Time, and Newsweek. He's photographed Kennedy family weddings including those of Maria Shriver to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Caroline Kennedy to Edwin Schlossberg, and John Kennedy, Jr. to Carolyn Bessette, as well as the weddings of such well-known people as Mariah Carey, Alan Greenspan, Tom Clancy, Peter Jennings, and that of Maria Cuomo to Kenneth Cole. He strongly advocates a natural, editorial depiction of events.

"Knowing when to press the shutter button, comes from your life experience, your sensitivity, your soul. It's difficult to quantify but the difference is clear. The quiet photographer is pensive and anticipating moments and sensing and feeling. The quiet photographer is the one who finds the interesting moments to document. In the quest of greatness in the capturing of images, the real challenge is to allow our souls and our personalities to come forth quietly and to tell us, to point us toward those moments that are interesting, beautiful, telling, the ones that will be profound in their impact on the viewer."

This thinking is all foreign to the cookie cutter photographer. They only know the "hey sweetheart, hold his hand and look this way. Great! Smile! Say 'Schnizzle'! 1, 2, 3..." routine, as they are of that school.

Thus, this photojournal mind-set is a primary ingredient in couture photography, along with talent, expertise, skill sets and several other behind-the-scenes attributes.

And what are those?

The Differences Between Cookie-Cutter vs. Couture Photography

...and what it means to you

The photographer's ability to create beyond a well exposed image starts with a superior image based on years of experience working with light, its quantity and more importantly, its quality. The word "photography" itself is Greek, meaning "to write with light" - the use of light against shadow being fundamental to photography, yet the average photographer has little to no knowledge of it because they are not artisans of the craft but only camera technicians.

A high end photographer creates a masterful image because they understand light. They also know how to use their camera, lenses and other tools, fully as well as the camera technician if not more so, to master whatever situation they come upon.