Case The Joint

I prefer to scout out wedding ceremony and reception venues in advance of proceedings. My best results have come from jobs where I’ve had a chance to meet and photograph the couple on location beforehand. My next assignment, for example, is on an island and I am very glad I have had a chance to check it out because, scenic as it is, it poses some interesting practical challenges.

The first hard lesson I learned about wedding photography I learned through an unfortunate experience of friends. Their photographers didn’t know until the time of the wedding itself that the use of flash was banned in the very old and gloomy chapel where they were getting spliced. Because the husband-and-wife team who were doing the job only had slow film with them, every shot of the ceremony suffered from motion blur.

I should point out that these were art photographers who’d been invited to film the day officially, rather than hacks like me. I never go anywhere without a few rolls of fast (800 or 1600 ASA) film and hardened event snappers tend to have multiple fall-back plans: in my case three cameras, three tripods, three flashes, several lenses and a lot of different rolls of film. (If I’d been stuck with rolls of 100ASA in the situation described I’d have underexposed it two stops and hoped that the job could be rescued by pushing it in the lab.)

Don’t just ask about flash photography; find out where and how much light falls inside and out, look for good areas to take group shots, check out the parking situation, ask the registrar/celebrant about his or her policy on taking photographs during proceedings—often this is discouraged during the vows and prohibited during the actual signing of the register; the document is Crown Copyright. Perhaps as important as all this, you should get some idea of what the skin, hair, and clothing colours of the happy-couple-to-be will be on the day and choose your film and lens filters/flash diffusers accordingly.

But, apart from checking out the rules and regs, there’s another good reason to pitch up on site early: you can prepare some scene-setting shots in the absence of distracting humans.

Take (some slow film,) a wide-angle lens, a stand for your camera, and a remote shutter release and arrange to be there when the grounds are quiet. In the case of the photo below I set up the camera and invited the future groom to press the shutter release. He used a screened version of the image to decorate the wedding invitations.