The Essential Guide to Gay and Lesbian Weddings (101 page)

Since everyone knows someone who has a camera or a camcorder, you'll probably get offers from friends who will want to shoot your wedding for you. But don't let your cousin who “just finished a course” take the only snapshots and hope for the best. Understanding exactly what you get when you hire a professional will help you to make the right choice for your wedding day.

A professional photographer doesn't just have a good eye for pictures and lots of gadgets that attach to a Nikon. Photographers and videographers have the ultimate responsibility of documenting for posterity everything that happens the day of the wedding. If they blow it, you'll have to content yourself with mental images (which get fuzzy with age, you know).

Once you pick yourself up off the floor after finding out what a professional photographer costs, you'll probably want to try to cut corners. However, good wedding photographers are worth their weight in gold. (Which coincidentally is just about what they'll charge you.)

How much can you expect to pay for a
professional wedding photographer? The average cost in most U.S. cities is $2,000–$4,500; in smaller cities, around $1,500. We've heard of couples paying name photographers up to $15,000 (although you probably wouldn't be able to get Matthew Rolston for that). No, this is definitely not going to be like those “50 Photos for $19.95!” specials that you always see advertised in the department stores.

For better or for worse, wedding photography has become a digital medium. Rolls of film have been replaced with data cards, and darkroom touch-ups are now Photoshop tweaking. Allow us to walk you through the process, from computer chip to finished album.

During your wedding, the photographer will take hundreds upon hundreds of shots. Since there is no “running out of film” or “added development costs,” an expert will take chances, playing with light and shutter speeds. The first fifteen clicks might be blurry, but the sixteenth will be perfect. At this point the pictures are in raw format, capturing the data from the digital camera's sensor and preserving it in a file to be manipulated outside of the camera, kind of like an old-fashioned negative. Think of a raw file as the DNA of a photograph.

Shortly after the wedding, the photographer will go through and eliminate the most unacceptable shots—things like eyes rolled back in their sockets and children picking their noses. The files will be converted into JPEG format, which is a compressed version of the raw format. The photos are then posted on the photographer's password-protected website. From this gallery, family and friends will be able to buy pictures or download them to attach to an e-mail.

Now comes the task of choosing the images for your album. In consultation with your photographer, anywhere between forty-five and seventy-five photos are securitized to be Photoshopped for the final image. This is the realization of the photographer's art. It is a labor-intensive process and can take up to an hour to get a single image exactly where the photographer wants it to be. Colors become more or less saturated, hues are more evident, and spinach is removed from one's teeth. You now have in front of you a high-resolution PSD, or Photoshop document, and the DNA of the original photo is given eternal life.

THEN
&
NOW

That Was
THEN
:

Photographers spent hours in a darkroom under a muted red bulb, inhaling potentially toxic chemicals to create just the right contrast and color saturation before printing the final photograph.

This Is
NOW
:

Photoshop, a digital tool, allows photographers freedom that was unimaginable in a traditional darkroom. If the magnificent image of you tossing your bouquet also contains an unsightly telephone pole on the horizon, the pole can be made to magically disappear.

There are a number of things that you are potentially buying when you hire a photographer. Let's break them down:

Albums:
Everyone's familiar with photo albums of the happy couple caught in various poses throughout the wedding day—at the altar, in the receiving line, cutting the cake, doing the limbo with little kids, and so on. The quintessential album tells a story from beginning to end. Many wedding photographers will include an assembled album in the cost of a package. Others will allow you to take a DVD of the final Photoshopped images to an independent vendor who specializes in albums.

Equipment:
The photographer will supply all necessary equipment, and you need to make sure it's compatible with your wishes. For example, if he or she relies heavily on the use of a full flash (which eliminates the shadows of natural light) and you're the kind of person who isn't comfortable knowing there's a camera pointed at you, better think twice.

Philosophy and Attitude:
When all is said and done, this is probably the most important part of choosing your photographer. There's a sort of catch-22 here in that you want someone with a good deal of experience at shooting weddings, because it's very tricky; a good photographer needs to wrangle people, be everywhere at once, and yet not be too obnoxious. He or she must have a feel for you as a couple: after all, this isn't an advertisement for detergent the photographer is shooting, it's two breathing human beings (plus entourage). Conversely, the more experience someone has at this, the more likely it is you'll find “burnout” that manifests itself in a kind of jaded “Okay, you two lovebirds, smile like you mean it” approach to everything. But in your case you have a trump card to play—you're a same-sex couple! This of course means that you'll have to find someone who's comfortable with that; chances are, she or he probably won't have shot many same-sex weddings before (if any), which makes you a brand-new challenge. You might even get a deal because the photographer will want to expand the boundaries of his or her portfolio. (Look at
www.wearefamilyphoto.com
for fabulous examples of gay wedding photography.)

Classic wedding photographers can be compared to the great portrait artists of the past centuries: they record an idealized version of the couple. Think of the classic wedding photographer as George Hurrell, the man who shot movie stars in the thirties and forties with soft, studied lighting and a dreamy look in their eyes. A classic wedding photographer has a whole list of “stock shots” culminating with a photograph of you waving good-bye at the exit for the final shot in the wedding album. Even the candid shots can look posed. The photographer might have you mime the throwing of the bouquet so the lighting will be just right, resulting in a somewhat studied moment of “excitement.”

The photojournalist approach couldn't be more different. As opposed to the fantasy of the moment, they want to record the reality. They'll
be as inconspicuous as possible, following the flow of the action but not being a part of it. To get into a photojournalist frame of mind, think of your wedding as being shot by Annie Leibovitz for
Vanity Fair
magazine.

Many couples these days want something in between these two approaches, with an album that incorporates a few of those campy portraits, maybe of the two of you superimposed inside of a cameo, as well as a number of candids that show you and your guests in real life moments. Decide how this percentage will break down for you, and let the photographer know this in no uncertain terms.