Let’s talk wedding photography styles

My photography integrates editorial, fine art and documentary/candid/reportage photography. What does this actually mean?

  • Editorial wedding photography - fashion/magazine influenced, posed or at directed by the photographer. The photos are creative and tell the story of the day with a glamorous or stylised look.

  • Fine art wedding photography - soft, natural images, often with a light and airy look and muted colours. Romantic and timeless, again often directed - but perhaps more gently - by the photographer.

  • Documentary, candid or reportage wedding photography - capturing the story of the wedding without posing or interfering. This is the most common way of photographing the ceremony, reception and dancing, sometimes called photojournalistic wedding photography.

What will your wedding look like?

  • Fine art wedding photography

    For a fine art wedding photography style your venue generally needs clean, white or grey walls, and you'll have mostly neutral, muted colours. A fine art approach of 'light and airy' wedding photography is much harder to achieve with red brick, woodland, dark rooms, or bold colours. Couples appear natural and fairly unposed.

    Make It

  • Editorial wedding photography

    Often overlapping with fine art, an editorial wedding photography look to me means something a bit more punchy. Bolder colours, and a more direct interaction with the camera for a characterful magazine/fashion photography style, this can work in a whole range of settings and colour schemes. Particularly when couples are up for posing a bit, this can be so much fun.

    Make It

  • Wedding reception photography

    Did I say I love photographing the evening dancing? You might think a photographer on the dance floor would make it awkward but in reality you get some amazing memories - and reminders of things you might otherwise forget from this often blurry part of the day. I often use a small flash off the dance floor to get truly epic images of your party.

    Make It

Colour or black & white?

I deliver a full set of colour images - the number depends greatly on the occasion but it’s usually between 600-800. You’ll then get every photograph in black and white too.

With wedding photography we often don’t have control of light and if bad light is affecting skin tones and sub-optimal colour I don’t want to give you that or have my name on it, so may deliver those images only in beautiful black and white.

The three discussed styles can both overlap and contradict each other. They are also all wonderful and usually fun. Invariably a wedding will have some documentary/candid photography and although it’ll be unposed and natural, it will ideally have a similar look to the rest of the wedding photography - maybe not quite as polished.

Fine art wedding photography relies quite heavily on the setting and other details. To truly nail a fine art look you can work with me to plan the look (flowers, suits, dresses, decor, colour schemes). For light and airy, colours are generally pastels and muted, the light is soft (not direct sunlight or harsh indoor lighting).

Editorial takes a bit more energy and fire from the couple on the day - I will meet you in this! - and we can work with the surroundings, with your people included.

To an extent these are all just words that have become popular and used to describe quite a wide range of types of photos.

If this FEELS like your look, then I can’t wait to meet you!