A Day With the Best Wedding Photographer in the World

In this video, you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at a real session and a real wedding day. But as the photographer being followed, I wanted to expand on a few things.

While the video gives you a good understanding of how I approach a wedding day as well as some insight into why I do certain things, I thought it might be nice to expand further into the "why" and explain the reasoning I have behind my approach for different parts of the day.

Capturing Moments  

As a whole, the majority of a wedding day is all about the real moments. While I love the portrait aspect of a wedding day, that is only a small part of the day. For me, moments are everything and the most important aspect of the wedding day. But these moments need to feel and look like genuine moments. In order to do this, I feel the moments must actually be genuine moments. So I don't do any type of directing or posing for any images of moments. I won't ask someone to do something, feel something, or perform for my camera in order to capture a moment-driven image. The main reason for this is that even if you create an amazing photo out of the performance, the client will always remember the fact that you had them do something to capture the image. This will forever remove their ability to feel something about the end result.

This is partially in line with the rules and ethics of photojournalism. But even though I am taking a photojournalistic approach to the moments part of the day, I am not fully adhering to the same rules. For example, if a bride is getting her dress on, I will more than gladly recommend a good area of the room for her to do this. Or, in an example you can see in the video, when the brides are going to do their first dance, I gave them some direction on where to dance (after verifying what type of dancing they planned to do). I have also been known to move around furniture to clean up a space, turn on/off lights, open curtains, as well as create my own lighting—all in an effort to have a better background, composition, or lighting for when a real moment starts to unfold.

Portraits and Portrait Breakouts 

In my mind, there are two areas of the day for portraits. The first is your traditionally scheduled portrait time—normally, right after the ceremony—and this time also usually includes things like family formals. And while, given the opportunity or the inspiration, I will absolutely try to capture some creative portraits during this time, more often than not, this time is very limited, and being limited on time does not normally lend itself to being creative (or at least to having the time to actually achieve a creative result). So, during the normally scheduled portrait time, I like to stick to the more normal or classic style portraits—things that are clean, classic, and don't require a ton of setup or experimentation. Though this obviously depends on the amount of time I have to work. If I have an hour, then we can go deeper down the creative rabbit hole. But normally, this portrait time is about 30 minutes and includes the time we need to spend capturing family formals. This part of the day is also shared with the video team, and if I have the couple tied up for most of the time with a creative portrait, that's less time for them to get the footage they need.

Where I prefer to get the creative juices flowing is during all the other parts of the day. This is where I have what I like to call "portrait breakout sessions," which is basically my fancy way of saying I can (and will) get inspired for a portrait idea at any time during the day—from getting ready to the late-night hours of the reception. What this does is give me the time to stumble into inspiration rather than trying to force it. It also lets me work through an idea without the stress of needing to perform. There is also the added bonus of these breakout sessions almost always being in a different location than the traditional portrait time, which gives the client more variety in their portraits while also giving me more potential to work with.

From here, I also always do some type of after-dark portrait time. This is sort of like a portrait breakout session, but after dark, and I do one for pretty much every wedding. So while this type of portrait is sort of "scheduled," it's always on my own time and of my own choosing. The way I tackle these is usually after the party dancing starts, and I’ll simply take a quick little walk around the property and look for something to inspire me. Once I have that inspiration, I’ll get as much setup done as needed before I get the couple. Not only does this allow me to get through any troubleshooting I may need to do for an idea first, but it also helps me get the couple back to their party as quickly as possible. There are times when a night portrait took 20 minutes, but the couple was only away from the party for 5 of those minutes.

Editing

Editing is a very big part of my workflow, and I am no stranger to using complex things like composites and multiple exposures. But as a whole, I prefer to get all the work done in camera. So what my general editing workflow looks like is I will cull the entire wedding for all images that will be delivered. I then do a base edit, which involves applying my preset via AI editing through Impossible Things. Once that runs, I will go through every image and make any fine-tune adjustments I feel are needed to both exposure and white balance, as well as apply some quick and easy local adjustments via gradients or AI masking.

Once the bulk gallery is done, I will do another cull in order to pick out my selects. These images need to be one of two things: either a portfolio/social-worthy image or the best image that will help me tell the story of the day through the client's slideshow or album. Once I have these select images done, I will do another pass of editing on them with more local adjustments, as well as removing any distractions with tools like Generative Fill or clone tools.

The last thing I will do before uploading the final images to the client gallery is retouch every single image (not just the selects) for things like blemishes, skin tone, specular highlights, some dodging and burning to smooth highlight-to-shadow transitions on the skin, as well as add a slight pop to people's eyes. Which sounds like a crazy task for a gallery filled with 2,000 images, but thankfully we have AI tools that can do this for us while we sleep. Because had you asked me to do this even two years ago, I’d have laughed in your face. But now it’s so easy it feels silly not to just do it for every delivered image.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this video, paired with the text, gives you some greater insight into what I do and how I do it. Though it’s worth mentioning that my way is not the "right" way. It’s simply the way I have found that works for me. It’s also worth noting that at no point did I mention gear. And while I am a big gearhead and have images that would be impossible to create without some very specific pieces of kit, gear is not the path that will lead you to creating better images for your client. The road to improvement is vision and process. And it’s only through the process that you may find a limitation that a certain piece of gear might help you unlock.