Looking beyond the obvious: images that need your time.
You could ask yourself why spend £££ on a photographer if your guests have wonderful phones that can take amazing images. Yes you could ask yourself that. My answer to this question is simple: your money isn’t spent on the gear I use but on my eye instead.
Of course, gear is important. However clever phones are nowadays, they still can’t cope with the versatility and creativity professional cameras give their owners.
BUT… if you were to look at my financial accounts and what my costs are, I spend just as much on educating my eye that I do on renewing my gear. I allocate hours a week on studying photobooks, I regularly go to art galleries, I attend photo talks online monthly. I have numerous portfolio reviews a year. I have working walls at home with images I love so I can look at them every day trying to understand why they are so good.
And this is why when you hire a pro, you’re not hiring their gear, you’re hiring their eye. Their way of looking at the world around them, their way of celebrating it. And for me that’s what my job is about: observing what goes on around me and capturing that split second moment that freezes a situation and tells a story.
What story can we tell about the photo above? Many could say “but you cut off the most important person in the photo, we can’t see her properly”… Trust me in any galleries I deliver, there are more than enough images of the bride… but there are also images of what goes on “beyond the obvious”. Because above, I didn’t care at that precise moment about how the bride looked, I cared about how her bridesmaid looked at her. I cared about that simple eye contact, the pause and potential thought “That might be me one day”.
These images take a little of your time to look at. And I guess that would make perfect sense. If you invest some money on a painting, you’d expect to want to look at it for more than just 1 second. And I guess it is the same with photography. If you are going to invest money in hiring a professional photographer, you’ll want to end up with images that well… need your time.
