Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories

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Part I ✦ Understanding Digital Wedding Photography

Figure 1-4: Finding the right light and posing a romantic scene takes a lot of practice.

118mm, f2.8, 1/128th, ISO 400

Recording Life’s Milestone with Pictures

In almost every human life, there are at least four major milestones: birth, marriage, birth of the first

child, and death. A wedding photographer has the privilege of being a witness and a historian on one of

those four big days.

If you’ve ever looked through old albums of pictures from your childhood, you may realize that the mem-

ories you have of your childhood are actually somehow tied to the pictures. For example, you probably

have many pictures where you can’t remember anything else that happened during that day or even that

month, but because you’ve looked at that picture many times over the years, the events immediately sur-

rounding it are somehow burned into your memory. I can’t explain how it works, but I do believe that

photographs help us to store memories in a way that makes them last for the rest of our lives.

The first time a bride looks through her pictures, there is a very high likelihood that she will be moved

to tears. If you’ve done a bad job, they will be tears of deep sorrow. If you’ve done a good job, they will

be tears of joy — the same tears that she cried when the groom read his vows and when her father made

a toast to their happiness. These are the memories, ...