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Weddings and Other Events

We believe we are the premier wedding photography studio in the Tri-State area. Would you value having photographers for your wedding who work very unobtrusively, are flexible, never push you or your guests around to "make" candid photos, but keep watching carefully and in that way quietly capture what happens, using a casual, relaxed, truly candid, documentary style? If so, you may well come to agree with us about our studio!

But that's not all we offer. On your wedding day we take lots of happy, rather informal "formals" (family and wedding party photographs) and we do that very fast, in about half an hour. At all other times we are very unobtrusive, taking real candids on the fly, combining the very best of traditional black and white photography with the latest high-resolution digital work.

Here is more about what you can expect from us. First, you will be able to pick your Principal Photographer, from those of us who are not yet booked. We will not change your Principal Photographer on you once you've made your decision, but we will pick an appropriate assistant for you. A month or more before the wedding, you will meet with your main photographer to plan your wedding day in detail. You and your photographer will discuss everything that is to happen, planning in advance to make sure the photography runs smoothly and meets your hopes. We'll come to the house if that seems appropriate, and the principal photographer is among the last people to leave the reception, leaving after you do.

Going back in time, let us make an engagement portrait for you. It's always fun and just look at the results! It's also a great way for you to get used to working with your Principal Photographer — but you are free to ask one of our other photographers to work with you on the project instead. And, of course, we will happily make an engagement portrait for you even if we are not photographing your wedding! Click on Portfolios and then on the Portraits thumbnail and look for the engagements.

When we photograph a wedding our approach is governed by the underlying principles discussed earlier under About Us/ Our Photography. There we referred to the aesthetic traditions of the artist portraitists and documentary photographers of the past. Like those photographers, and like most contemporary artists using other media, we are not seeking to make "beautiful works of art." The artistic tradition which underlies and informs our work has other goals, most of them social and conceptual.

Our job is to find and preserve what makes your wedding special, to represent that uniqueness for you in such a way that you will not bury your album in a drawer but will continually turn to it as a source of joy, strength and inspiration. That, if you like, is the beauty we seek to preserve for you in our wedding photography.

We'll make the color and black and white photographs using various cameras. Unlike other photographers in the area and for many miles around, we continue to use "old-fashioned" film for all our black and white photographs and print them ourselves on fine-art fiber paper. Why continue to use film? (If you have already read our page on Our Photography, then you might want to skip this!) First of all, we can't print digital files onto the fine old papers that are so lovely and so lasting. That alone is reason enough for us to hesitate before changing to digital black and whites.

But there is more. Every true black and white photograph has its own unique texture or grain derived from the film on which it was captured. Often the texture of film-based black and whites is quite subtle; sometimes it is very powerful. Either way, in the hands of a sensitive photographer the grain structure itself forms a central component of the photograph.

Since digital cameras use no silver, black and white prints made from digital files can’t show grain. The difference between our black and white images and those made from digital files, by other photographers, is like the difference between a table built from fine wood and one constructed out of plastic. The plastic one has no grain. We choose the "wooden" one!

Finally, true black and white images like ours, properly processed by hand, will outlast digital images, perhaps by hundreds of years. Black and white wedding photographs from us are, in a real sense, fine art photographs, made for future generations.

For more on our use of both digital and film-based capture and printing, see the opening paragraphs of this section on Weddings, and also About Us: Our Photography.

Your Wedding Day

We approach every wedding differently, according to the personalities of the people involved. For us, each wedding is by definition and in reality totally unlike every other. The challenge is to find what sets it apart, so that we may capture this in our images. We truly enjoy the hours we spend at weddings; they provide us with intellectual, emotional and artistic challenge, as we assemble our account of your wedding. In order to achieve our underlying goals, we need to ensure that for much of the day you hardly even notice we're there.

To view a significant number of images from several recent weddings click on Portfolios at the top of this page and then on the Weddings thumbnail.

Our task is to merge into the background. We'll watch for what matters, for significant happenings, interactions and feelings, and quietly photograph the day as it unfolds without interfering. We'll try to make many images of you, of your families and friends. We'll do our best to document the whole day with compelling photographs, capturing feelings, friends, family, and fun, you on your wedding day, anything that will help keep your wedding day alive for you all your lives..

And here are a few things that we won’t do! We won't drag you off to the very best sites for formal photographs, encouraging you to travel miles to reach them. We'll not take several hours over the family and wedding party photographs. We'll not make "artistic", soft focus or infra-red photos, generically "beautiful" but ultimately meaningless wedding photos, images perhaps superimposed on sheets of music, or maybe on a photo of the church or your cake. We'll certainly not follow you around all day. We'll never turn you or others around to face the camera, with a request to "Smile please!" And we'll never stage "happenings" to heighten the apparent excitement of the day. None of these are consistent with our goals.

"Posed" family and wedding party photographs we will definitely take. They will be happy, often somewhat informal relaxed images. You need these photos; they're very important. But they shouldn’t be a drag. Don't worry about needing to strike poses for them or waste hours hanging around to make them. (Of course, if you like posing you can go ahead. We won’t stop you!) These photos will take about half an hour. The result should be natural, interesting, fun photos of the people who are at the centre of your day, not generic, elegant, bored fashion-book "wedding" pictures. Our biggest contribution to these photographs is often to crack a few jokes, releasing any tension that may linger after the ceremony. Then we'll try hard to photograph you just at the moment the underlying happiness of the day breaks though to the surface. This whole experience, the making of the family and wedding party photos, will be an enjoyable, light-hearted happening that contributes positively to your memories of the day. This is the only thing that we will direct; we’ll try and make it short and fun!

For the rest of the day, we will act as if we were wildlife photographers. Truly! We watch and watch and hide away and watch. And when you've all begun to take us for granted, we'll quickly take a photograph or two. That is how we set about making a true, compelling record that will keep you coming back again and again to your photos. At the end of the day, or evening, your principal photographer will still be there, quietly waiting till you go, continuing to document the day to the very end.

Our Style

View larger images here.

Is our style photojournalism? Not really. We call it "documentary" for good reason. You can call it Wildlife Wedding Photography if you like. Either will help you understand the spirit of our work better than labeling us photojournalists..

It is true that, like photojournalists, we work hard to capture significant moments. But how can we really work like photojournalists when we’re not producing images for publication? Our readership is a tiny group — mainly you, the couple at the center of it all. Instead of trying to catch an editor's eye and perhaps get a stunning shot on the front page that will set the world on fire, we are trying to give you and your closest family and friends a deeply felt record of your own unique wedding day.

Wedding photography involves unobtrusively making dozens of portraits – of several different kinds: there are the relatively formal group photographs, the quiet, unnoticed studies during the ceremony and the more serious moments of the reception, and the many candids we take in the course of the day. These are all just different kinds of portraits. Every one is a study of human interaction, movement, personality, feeling. A wedding is not a photo-op or a fashion show; for you it is a very significant event—which we try to document in a powerful, interesting, compelling way. While the clothes, the color, the ritual and surroundings all have their relevance and need to be captured, our subjects are really the people—all the people but especially you yourselves and those whose feelings lead us closest to the center of your wedding.

Anything that pulls us away from that core yields images which will lose their relevance as the years pass. Tricks and pure trivia and shock-tactics have a place in our work — a very limited place. They belong more properly to photojournalism, where the photographer's prime task is to grab the attention of the viewer at all costs. They lead us away from your real wedding day.

We have found that a training in and reverence for the methods and goals of photojournalism are hard to reconcile with really good wedding photography. Your wedding day is grounded in your feelings and those of the people closest to you; our goal must be to dig beneath the surface of the day, find and capture the emotions that lie there -- as honestly and sensitively as we can. You and your family are too deeply involved in the day to accept a superficial account of your wedding, and we must certainly avoid that.

Your Proofs, Enlargements and Albums

Your wedding is over and you are back from the honeymoon. Soon after that you can come and pick up your proofs and CD. They are ready within about two weeks of the wedding, color and black and white, as they were taken. Generally three hundred or more.

The proofs come to you in a magazine-style proof album and on a printable CD, both of which you will keep. There are a number of ways in which you and your families and friends can make prints from your wedding — or have them made. You can freely print small photographs from the files on your CD. (You have a copyright release for personal use.) Those files should print well up to about 4" X 6" or perhaps 5" X 7" -- though the black and white files were made by scanning film and were not really intended for printing beyond your proof book. Larger images and photographs that you want really good prints of we will be happy to make for you. We suggest that you have us make all your black and white enlargements.

We will design your album with you, and will complete the work as rapidly as possible, generally within about six weeks from your final order. At the same time we will make all the enlargements you have ordered. Finally, we permanently store your negatives and digital files, and you may come back at any time for more prints. For your second anniversary we will send you an archival copyright-released CD containing high resolution files of your wedding images.

Here, in a nutshell, is what you will get from us. First, we believe that a proof book and a good full-size album are an essential part of our wedding coverage, but as long as you include those you can vary our package (which is set out below) almost without limit. We have mentioned that you will have two photographers. And that is indeed our norm. However, if you have less than 120 guests at your wedding you may wish to have only one photographer. There is a slight difference in price. And you may add extra pages in your album, include more albums, and make provision for us to print loose photographs for you of any size, both color and black and white. Our basic unmodified package is set out below. For details of pricing and available albums etc please Contact us.

 

Other Events: a Bar Mitzvah

We enjoy photographing other events, in much the same way as we photograph weddings. Here is one example of a Bar Mitzvah: