Wedding photography

A wedding gives no second take. The light is whatever the room has, and each moment happens once. The craft is speed: a fast prime, a wide aperture, and a camera already standing at the right distance.

The look follows from that, and it is not a choice of style. Available light at f/1.4 in a warm hall beside a cold window puts two colour temperatures in one frame. That split is what makes a picture read as a wedding rather than as a session.

Say available light only, and name the two sources. Tungsten or candlelight from the room, and daylight through a window or an open door. Say that they stay unmatched.

Name the lens and the aperture. A 35mm prime at f/1.4 or f/2 for the group work, a 50mm for the close frames, an 85mm for the ceremony from the back.

Put the camera inside the group. Chest height, one arm from the nearest person, and people cut by the frame edge. A wedding picture taken from outside the circle reads as a stranger's picture.

Use it for any crowded indoor event where the moment leads: a wedding, a party, a christening, a wake, a long family dinner.

Leave it alone when the picture has to be clean. Mixed colour and a crowded frame will fight a product shot or a controlled portrait.

Portrait photography stands two metres back with a long lens and controls the light. Wedding photography takes the light it finds and stands inside the group.

Documentary photography uses the same plain gear, but it returns to one subject for months or years. A wedding is one day with a client at the end of it.

Cinema publishes Available Light and Window Light as lighting entries. Those name the sources. This entry is the whole job that happens around them.

The reportage wedding grew out of 1990s newspaper photographers taking weekend work, and it replaced the posed group album across Britain and the United States inside about ten years. Kodak Portra 400 and Portra 800 carried it on film, because both hold skin tone under tungsten without turning it orange. The digital version runs on the same two primes, a 35mm and an 85mm, both at f/1.4.

The picture comes back lit by a flash on the camera, flat and even, with a black background. Say available light only, say no flash, and name the two sources by name.

The white balance comes back matched, so the hall and the window are the same colour. Say that the warm light and the cool light stay unmatched in the frame.