My Style
What will you get if you book me for your wedding?
It may seem unnecessary to spell out in words what I believe my ‘style’ to be, as there are many images in my website, but I’d like to talk about why I shoot the way I do now.
When I first started my photography career, I was wrapped up in the ‘look’ of the image. By this I mean the colour, the technical aspects of exposure and composition and where the light fell onto the subject. While all of this is, of course, important, I realise now that I wasn’t concentrating fully on the emotion of the moment. The more photographs that I took, the more I realised that I needed to shift those priorities. More important than all of those aspects is the moment captured. The eye contact between the subjects, the story the image tells and the physical contact between people. If an image isn’t perfectly sharp or perfectly lit, but tells the viewer something about the subject or about the feel of the wedding day, then it’s a valid and important image. Please don’t get me wrong, I always strive to get beautiful, sharp and appealing images, but they must also contain that certain something that makes you remember the image afterwards.
For example, take this photograph of me as a child, with two of my three sisters.
It isn’t technically perfect at all. There’s a light leak over me on the left and it’s underexposed, but it says all you need to know about our three characters. Tanja loved biting her nails, Tamsin was always curious and I was a big reader. To me this image would not have said as much about us, if we had all been staring at the camera with polite, fixed smiles on our faces. The only deceptive part of the image is that we aren’t at each other’s throats like we actually were most of the time, ha ha. It’s an unusually peaceful moment in the Mavric household, but an equally important one to capture. It’s also an example of how eye contact isn’t always necessary. It feels like we didn’t know the photo was being taken.
So, having said all that … how will I shoot your wedding? My aim is to document your day as truthfully as I can. As far as possible I will try not to direct you or the action (except for a handful of necessary group shots). However, in order to provide you with images of the details of your wedding that you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on, like the table centre pieces, bouquets etc, I will be slightly more hands on. There may also be instances when I might gently move the bride into better light, while she is having her make-up done, but I will do my best to keep this kind of interference to an absolute minimum.
It’s my opinion that the best wedding photographers are the ones whom you barely notice during the course of the day. We’re not there to be ‘important’ and to bark orders at guests. The less involvement we have, the truer our images, as the image above shows. What does this mean for ‘couple portraits’, though? It’s my experience that even if it’s only twenty minutes away from your guests, you will look back on those photographs and be really happy that you took the time to do them. Of course, if you’d rather not do this, I completely understand. Remember, it’s YOUR day, and you don’t have to do anything photographically that doesn’t suit you. This is even more reason to choose your photographer carefully. It’s one of the few areas of the stressful wedding planning process where you might actually get to have some control. Fortunately, I believe it’s the most important decision you’ll make!
So, if you would like to have a chat with me about your day and to find out more about my packages, please feel free to contact me via the contact button at the top of the page.
Kirsten
