Never Gamble on your Wedding Photographs

It was my birthday when Neil proposed. He hadn't planned an elaborate event with a brass band or skywriting, "Will you marry me?" But he did have his heart set on asking me on my birthday. The problem was, I had other plans that did not include him. I got a chance to go on vacation with my family so I was miles away. Not to be deterred or delayed, Neil gave me a call. This was before the advent of cell phones so I was on a land line sitting in my sister's living room when he "popped the question." In my mind, there were serious things to discuss before I could answer that question and we certainly couldn't do it long distance and with my family listening in. So I made him agonize for three days until we could be together. The discussion didn't last long.

We married young, at the age of 21 (well he was 21 and I was just short of it). We didn’t know much about planning a wedding but we launched into the process of wedding planning with gusto. Money was tight and we looked carefully at every expenditure. I loved to sew so I decided to make my wedding dress and the shirt that Neil wore (this was 1975 and it was a bit of a “hippie wedding”). The cake was made by a friend (spice cake with maple frosting, yum!) We even scheduled Neil and a friend (who'd both worked in restaurants to get through college) to "chef" the rehearsal dinner at my parent's house.

The one place that we did not consider scrimping was the photography. We chose Silverton photographer, Bill Hanson, a previous president of the Professional Photographers of Oregon (PPO), as our photographer. His images of our Important Day were beautiful. He was a true professional from start to finish.

Just two years later, Neil and I were starting our own photography studio in Monmouth. At the urging of fellow photographer Clarence Palmer, we joined the PPO ourselves. 

We studied our craft and made sure that every image was perfect, or at least as close as we could get. And we learned … FAST! We listened to every bride and groom. What was important to them? As time went on, the wedding photography style and emphasis changed. Our style became more photo journalistic.We added interesting angles and perspectives, details of dresses and flowers, and guests having fun to the posed photographs that were once the mainstay. But we never lost sight of what was important: the people, the story, and the emotions of the day.

Often, people would come up to us and tell us about their own experience with a wedding photographer that was not so happy. There was the bride who told her photographer that the photograph of her father walking her down the aisle was very important to her. After the wedding, she was told that all of the ceremony photographs were “lost” and all they had was one badly exposed photograph from the back of the church. No photograph of her with her father on that special day. He passed away four years later. 

There was the bride that came into the studio a year after the wedding with her dress in tow for a studio portrait because the photographer that had been hired never took a photograph that showed the entire dress. For so many of us, that dress represents so much of what we've dreamed about for years! What was that photographer thinking?

We've seen and heard so many examples of bad lighting, photographs of the backs of heads, "important" photographs never taken, blurry photographs, even photographers that dropped out of sight after the wedding without delivering what had been promised. Sometimes couples brought the bad photographs in to show us. “Is there something you can do with this?” It has broken my heart, time and again. There are some things that you just can’t recreate. It needs to be done right the first time.

Don’t think that digital photography has made these problems disappear. We still hear stories of missing photographs – flash cards can be erased or simply lost, files can be corrupted, hard drives can crash. We hear even more stories of blurry photographs and bad lighting than we used to, as many new photographers just assume the camera will perfectly focus and expose every image by itself and never check what they're getting. In fact, in the digital age, more people think that their friend just starting out in photography will be “good enough”, as if just a camera being there was the only thing that mattered. 

These stories are incentive for Neil and I to give 110% to every wedding that we photograph. It is the fire in our belly. We photograph from every angle and find the story, the people, and the heart in every moment of the day. Mechanical devices have no concept of "story" whatever, but we do! We have learned to find beauty on 100 degree days and find fantastic light at high noon on a cloudless day in the middle of the summer. Of course we back up everything and we back up the back-ups so nothing is ever lost. And we keep our promises. How could we do any less?