Shoot the Wedding how it “Feels”?

You can shoot what something looks like, or you can shoot what it felt like to be there.

Is this possible? Or is this just artsy fluff?

Shoot what it feels like is great advice, it also sounds like something a second year photography teacher would tell his students.

How does one actually do that?

Aren’t we just there to take photographs of what happened?

Through our eyes, we’re able to see what happened, in real time. We’re able to experience the thing in front of us through our eyes, and if it’s an emotional moment, we “feel” it in our hearts.

Our cameras have an ability that our eyes do not. We cannot adjust shutter speed to make things blurry or sharp, we can’t change the focal length of what we see or adjust the depth of field to change what the scene looks like, but, a camera can!

And that’s how we “shoot what it feels like”.

We use the camera, the lens, the ability to adjust for motion, light, depth of field, focal length of lens to show the viewer the scene that we’re observing in that moment.

I became a better photographer of people at weddings when I began to focus on the human story of the day.

I noticed that the images that people most reacted to and resonated with where the “emotional” images - the ones that showed the feeling of the day vs the stuff and details.

So over time, my focus shifted from what is commonly considered a wedding photograph, to photographs that are more “feel” based - emotional images, ones with interaction with others, and images that show the energy of the day.