LeeSimms
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Great question.
Beyond the wedding couple's 'hero shots' that populate social media, one could question all the other parts of a typical wedding essay image collection. Do we really need anything more than 5 or 6 images for Instagram? Will anyone look at a photo of the cake? Does anyone really care about all those drunken dance party photos? What's really important here?
To answer, consider the wider audience of the wedding images and the images' ephemeral status. Most successful photographers get referrals from venues, planners, florists, and dj's so documenting their efforts (and the couple's exhaustive efforts planning those details) seems like a slam-dunk for industry goodwill. Now consider a couple's 30th anniversary. Even 1,000 delivered wedding images on that day will seem like too few as a percentage of the wedding guests, family, and friends alike, will no longer be alive. You're a walking time-machine with (hopefully) a sense of aesthetics.
Our second shooters that get the most amount of work move with grace in cocktail hour and get clutter-free images with great lighting and without flickering edges. Make everything look like a magazine and you'll do fine. A couple of times a year, a bride or a groom might specify "the details are really important to us" or "I really don't like photos of things" and we'll steer the bus a bit towards their desires but it's safe just to keep to the center lane. Not too many, not too few. A well-lit big empty room shot with a single table images and a place-setting detail. A lot of middle-class weddings don't have professional planning/decor staff and the venue might arrange a guest book / thank you favor table that doesn't look great in photos. We courage are 2nds to art direct on the fly and take just a moment to arrange table items to tell a better story (in a 2x3 frame).
We see online guest log-on's down from 5+ years ago (every wedding guest is now a photographer and might personally capture all the images they want to see from the experience) but it's not uncommon to still have 75+ guest visits the first day a gallery goes live. The same week, we might post a 'better' looking wedding (more attractive couple, expensive venue, well-dressed guests) but the bride's such a perfectionist she only wants to share a personally groomed collection of 50 or so images from her day. The result from that event is that only the couple visits (to download the full collection) and one or two of the vendors will visit to clip a few decor shots. The biggest guest visit count we see are usually from the events with big wedding parties, big families, or big friend sets. Their life journey has made them more comfortable in their skin and ok if one or two less-than-perfect images/moments hits other people's eyes (or the internet).
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