Modern Day Weddings

Johnson, in his 40s, says he is old enough to remember when his wedding photography jobs lasted around three hours - he was there to capture the arrival at the church or register office, shoot the ceremony and take portraits and photographs for an hour or so afterwards.

"You didn't do any bridal preparation, or stay for the party." Now, he says, couples want coverage from early in the morning until midnight or later. "I used to just take one camera and one lens," he adds; now he brings a van of equipment...

After the Wedding
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976)
Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum

Some couples now want to be photographed on beaches at sunset, or clifftops, or up mountains. They want drones and multiple angles, and they employ "content creators" alongside the more traditional photographer. Wedding photographers are often working 16-hour days, barely stopping for a break, and under pressure to capture every detail. Then many couples want to see a preview of the photographs the next day...

Many wedding photographers blame social media for fuelling unrealistic expectations and escalating the photography to the point where it threatens to to take over the whole day... Instagram accounts such as Vogue Weddings, which features stylish, beautiful, usually rich and often famous couples have become hugely influential...

Hannah Warmisham, a wedding photographer based in Gloucestershire, has sympathy for newly engaged couples being overwhelmed with images of all the ways their wedding could look.

"You're seeing all these amazing things [that are] part of people's day, you're not seeing the whole day. So you might see someone on a rooftop in New York with a million dollars' worth of florals all around them and think: 'Oh, I want that.' Or you see people on top of mountains. I think it is quite hard to keep a level head.... One modern trend is for "first look" shots - where the couple see each other dressed up, before the ceremony. It's lovely but sometimes high pressure because it's only going to happen once and is often very quick."...

Another photographer recently shot a wedding for a couple who also had a videographer and two content creators and described it as a "bunfight". One of the content creators missed getting footage of the father of the bride's "first look" at his daughter, and asked him to recreate it later in the day, without his daughter even being there...

For many couples though, it's also about getting images on social media as soon as possible. Around nine months ago, Angela Hughes, a photographer and film-maker based in Dorset, did her first wedding alongside "wedding content creators" - a team wielding iPhones, whom the couple wanted to prioritise over Hughes's photography...

With Hughes's work, it can take days and often weeks to perfect the photographs - choosing which of the 3,000 or more images to keep, then editing them using Photoshop. A Video can take two or three weeks to put together. By contrast content creators can upload raw footage on to social media almost immediately. 

(Emine Saner, The Guardian, 2024)

So you climb the hill in full wedding dress after the ceremony to have that once in a lifetime photo.But what about your invited guests? Wouldn't they be left for a couple of hours while you disappeared?