A friend recently emailed me a link to a wedding photographer’s blog. Some of the work there was good, but I didn’t add it add the site to the blogroll here because most of it was what I am going to call “shouty photography”. The photographer had an excellent eye for composition and for an unusual viewpoint, but there was a lot of check-out-my-new-lens wide-angle/fish-eye stuff and every frame was Photoshopped to Hell: the colours were over-saturated, the brightness and contrast were cranked up, and I suspect that all sorts of background clutter had been removed by computer. (Given the intensity of the flash lighting used and the quality of those shadows that remained in the images, I am sure that others had been cloned out.) And of course, he’d been painting that artificial blur all over the place as only a man with a digital camera and the vaguest idea about aperture settings can.

I’m sure he doesn’t need the help of a link from me. His is a style that probably grabs clients immediately. I am happy to recommend other photographers with different approaches from mine, but I would never recommend one like him.

Shouty photography reminds me of the extremely stylised, self-proclaimed “new generation portraiture” of Venture, the high street family photographer. It’s expensive (to buy, if not to do), it’s manipulative (in more than one sense of that word), it’s fake, and it’s about images and not about people. When you browse a wedding photographer’s portfolio, you should be smiling at the moments captured, not thinking: “I wonder how he got that angle/effect/pose?” All photography dates, but the worst thing about this kind of work is that it’s dated the moment you get the prints. Today’s new generation is tomorrow’s old generation. In a few months time, every domestic camera owner will be using their home PC and some knocked-off digital photo software to create the same or similar effects in the hope of spicing up their own grey snaps. Then the game will be up. Ten years hence, photos that have been treated this way will be the still equivalent of those psychedelic visuals you see on old editions of Top Of The Pops.

If you are looking for a wedding photographer and one sidles up to you with an album that, the moment he opens it, screams “look at me!” then block your ears. When you’re 64, you’ll be glad you did.

I recently shot a wedding reception at Shakespeare’s Globe. Not only did the bride-and-groom do a brilliant job of organizing the event, the workers at the venue were excellent. The Globe is new to weddings so there was at least one glitch: a large window let in so much of the intense afternoon sunlight that it was blinding for many of the guests seated at their meals. Eventually a couple of the waiting staff found a large screen and blocked it. Before they did, I took this contre-jour shot with the theatre in the background:

I took two exposures of the scene. In this one, the shutter opened just before the little girl’s left foot touched the ground and closed before she stepped on the light. Now that last splash of brightness is burned in silver, probably for decades. Strange, innit?

Via lifehacker, I see that Digital Photography School has an interesting essay up entitled How to Be a Curious Photographer.

I believe that the best photography, like the best of other kinds of craftsmanship, is often created by those who know the “rules” so well that they can confidently break them. The photograph below is technically “wrong”, just like the frame that forms the banner of this Website, but I still think it’s very good. The subjects of the photo are relatively tiny and exactly centred in the frame. There are seven people in it, but you can’t see any of their faces—and, anyway, most of them are out of focus and cut off by the edges of the view.

But the picture is striking and tells a story. Telling a story is the point of photojournalism. Some wedding photographers call this naturalistic, narrative approach “photojournalistic” or “reportage“.

This week I have been breaking one of my own rules and manipulating my images digitally: to remove an ambulance from the background of some group photographs. I used the “clone tool” in The Gimp, a wonderful free (both “free-as-in-free-beer” and “free-as-in-free-speech”) image manipulation package. There’s a simple reason for this: the ambulance is a completely unwanted distraction from some pleasing formal shots. It isn’t relevant to the event or aesthetically pleasing, and it isn’t a nice omen for a marriage. Removing the ambulance was also, thanks to the nature of the rest of the background, relatively straightforward to do—if boring and time-consuming.

In photojournalism, there are good “distractions” and bad “distractions”. Good distractions can contribute to the plot, often by forcing you to read a picture in a particular way, or contribute to the composition, sometimes as counterpoints. Bad distractions interfere with a picture’s story or detract from its beauty. In real photojournalism, however, deleting distractions is frowned upon.

For a top professional’s views on such matters you should read this interesting Q&A with Michele McNally, The New York Times‘s Assistant Managing Editor for Photography. Scroll down to the section headed with the question “How do you feel about distracting elements in a photo…?” McNally’s answer covers both framing and focus. It explains how lopped off limbs and blurry blobs can make a good photograph and is illustrated by some excellent, if small, example images. (In the same article she also discusses the NYTimes‘s policy on digital tinkering.)