As a wedding photographer in Greece for more than 20 years, we know that when it comes to choosing a wedding photographer, it can be massively overwhelming. In this blog post, we will be focussing on explaining what is unobtrusive wedding photography, why we love it, and why in our experience is the best wedding photography style! When searching for a photographer, we think a good place to start is to decide on what style/approach would really suit you, and, you may have guessed it from the title of this article, but we think unobtrusive wedding photography is the style to go for. For us, this works perfectly by building a relationship with our clients from day one.
In this post, we will be covering how unobtrusive wedding photography is
- A matter of Memories
- Seeing things you didn’t even know happened
- Perfect if you’re camera shy or self-conscious
- About the raw emotions
- Blending in with the crowd
- About relaxing and just enjoying your wedding day.
Ready to know more about why unobtrusive wedding photography is great? Keep on reading!
It’s a matter of Memories
When you look back at your images you’ll remember what you were feeling, rather than what you had been told to do by a photographer. This is unobtrusive wedding photography and it is *so* important. Although we will guide you and help you pose if needed, we won’t be pestering you with tips all the time. When you look at your wedding photographs, you can be transported back to the moment (sorry if that sounds a little grand, but it’s really true!) and you can almost re-live the memory of your father seeing you in your wedding dress for the first time, or the moment you oh-so-nervously glanced towards the ceiling as your bride walked down the aisle…and that’s because your photographer captured the moment naturally, without any direction. Again, we will be bringing our expertise and style so the images still look polished, well-staged, and curated but without losing the effortless element that’s so important when capturing feelings and special moments.
Seeing things you didn’t even know happened
While formal family portraits are often a small part of our wedding coverage, we generally seek to fade into the background, to capture moments as they happen. Perhaps one of the biggest compliments you can give us is “We didn’t even notice you were there”. The bride and groom are obviously the most important people at a wedding – and will obviously be in lots of the photos – but they can’t be everywhere at once, and as experienced wedding photographers we know this. Not only do we know this, but we also massively appreciate how there are hardly any occasions in life where the people closest to you – both family and friends – are all in one place. Choosing our unobtrusive wedding photography style means that we will capture moments and snippets of your friends and family you didn’t even witness yourself on the wedding day. You can literally look at your wedding images, and see things you didn’t even know had taken place. Pretty magical, we think, if combined with our natural and timeless way of capturing a wedding. Unobtrusive wedding photography is so powerful because real moments are timeless, real moments will never go out of style.
It’s perfect if you’re camera shy or self-conscious.
Hands up if this applies to you (we know it does to us!). That’s why we have dedicated an extensive blog post to tackling camera shyness! It’s totally natural to feel like this; so many of us have our insecurities, and it can be scary to think we’re going to be photographed all day. However, this is why our unobtrusive style comes in handy and that’s another key benefit of our effortless photography approach. We won’t be asking you to pose, or repeat things, or look at the camera – our very goal is to capture moments while you’re totally unaware they’re doing so. And if we have to help you pose we will do it most delicately, so you can enjoy your day without stressing.
About the raw emotions.
There is nothing quite like a wedding when it comes to witnessing a truly myriad of emotions – it’s one of the reasons why so many photographers are drawn to weddings in the first place, as capturing emotion is both so thrilling and incredibly rewarding. These moments of raw emotion can’t be staged. They just can’t be re-created or set up; that’s just not the way emotion works. Our unobtrusive style will capture all the beauty and emotion as it happens. It sounds simple, but it’s really not; capturing emotion is an art – just as wedding photography as a whole is an art.
Shooting the couple’s engagement session also helps us build relationships for when the big day comes. We love to photograph the hidden interactions at weddings, but clients have to feel comfortable around us or it won’t happen. The more relaxed you are around us, the more those moments will happen. That’s why we seek to ensure a trusting relationship by meeting with the couple—in person or via Skype—multiple times before the wedding. We listen, and we ask a lot of questions and we let our couples know that the better we know them, the more we can identify what to look for when shooting the wedding. They inherently trust us because they know we care.
We often get mistaken for guests – Yes!
And that’s a very good thing! Our goal is to blend in with the people so much that the guests think that the photographers are actually guests – and this is because we won’t be manically controlling the day, barking orders, or telling people what to do, but rather blending in with the crowd, almost-invisibly capturing moments without people being aware. Of course, there will be moments we will quietly help you pose in the most flattering angle but that will all happen almost effortlessly, to ensure the quality of the shots we’re known for and the beauty of your true emotions. There’s a time to be bold and there’s a time to disappear—physically (to get an overhead shot, for example) or metaphorically when everyone at the wedding sees us as guests and not photographers.
Also, when people are captured totally naturally – when they don’t know they’re having their photograph taken – people look their best: Natural, beautiful…themselves. Because capturing the real you, well, that’s what beauty really is. As soon as people know they’re being photographed, they change – whether this is to put on their ‘camera-face’, or to change whatever it is they’re doing at the time because they think it may not look too good. The irony is that as soon as they do either of those things, they often don’t look their best – people can look unnatural, stiff, or awkward when they ‘think’ they’re doing what looks good. Our unobtrusive wedding photography style tackles that perfectly!
It’s about relaxing and just enjoying your wedding day.
There are so many things to be thinking about at your wedding; we don’t want photography to be one of them. When you’re hiring us you can relax and just enjoy your day, safe in the knowledge that all those important moments are being captured perfectly and we have almost 20 years to back us up. We may still take you away for a few portraits (if you want that, of course) or group shots (again, only if you want them), we won’t be taking you away from your guests for hours like traditional photographers sometimes do. It’s your wedding, not a photo shoot, so just go about having the time of your lives, rather than posing in front of a camera all day.
Looking for a wedding photographer to capture the beauty and the unique moments of your wedding day? We’ll be glad to do the honors! Contact us or schedule your call!
