Pictures

Photography may not seem like the most urgent matter at this stage, but I reckon it has the potential to consume wads of time. So we resolved to start the consumption early. Photography is a detail inviting ruinous micromanagement---we all now have nice cameras and take many many pictures. Some of them are pretty nice. One might thus easily presume that a professional can be given good advice on how to do their job. But I know that's wrong. I'm trying to back away from that illusion, and take a more reasonable approach.

Foremost, we want a photographer that knows what to do. At the bridal expo we met lots of photographers who told us they focus on giving clients exactly what they want. I don't tell my clients that what I want is to give them exactly the summary judgement motion they want. What I want is for the photographer's to take good pictures (and to take the necessary battery of family shots).

Luckily my fiancee and I have similar ideas about what we want in terms of style -- when we find it, we plan to let the photographer do her thing unmolested by hacks' advice. As for that style, we are taken with the current fashion of "journalistic" slash "documentary" wedding shots. These tags imply that the pictures capture, with the unbiased and searching eye of the responsible professional journalist, the unvarnished sentiment of moments, in lieu of some staged presentation. Obviously, the pictures only capture the look of being unvarnished. Substance as style is the modern cry for authenticity in a mostly fabricated world, or something. I feel like we may be coming in mid-fad into a hackneyed academic trope, but we like how it looks. And it wouldn't be the first time.

Letting a photographer loose requires that she is good, at technique and in compositions. I.e., we don't want numerous close ups of wine glasses and shoes. But while we prefer an artist with a point of view, so to speak, we don't want an angry auteur making giving every photo the unnegotiably raw power of the subject. People must look good in the pictures. We've begun searching for this reasonable auteur in some instructive conversations discussed in forthcoming entries.