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Reportage Wedding Photography is still thought by quite a few to be a recent trend in photography. In reality it has a long heritage and was sometimes known as candid photography in the context of a wedding. Noticed by extreme traditionalists (a rare breed now) as a new fad, it was felt to threaten the supremacy of the medium format camera with its staged shots and posed set ups.
In the old style, photographers often had a big camera set up on a tripod and even a hood over the head of the photographer. This Extremely formal and pretty posed art of portraiture was born, like so quite a few of today's cultural norms, of technological limitations. Way back when, photographic technologies required long exposure times, long winded plate or film alterations and "maintain still" poses. Rapidly 35 mm film essentially solved this challenge, once more with certain limitations. Lighter cameras holding rolls meant that photojournalistic strategies could be applied to wedding photography.
The game changer was that wedding photography needed no longer to be posed. Wedding Photography could now grow to be Reportage Photography. Precious moments, unrepeatable in a pose are only achievable with the participants getting unaware that a camera is in use. Fast film offered this to a degree, while the fastest film was ISO 1600 or 3200 and had been very grainy. In truth the grain produced by fast film (which enabled action freezing photojournalism in low-ish light) became a signature "appear" found in Time magazine and other iconic journals.
Naturally, wedding photography began to borrow this appear and start out demanding the grainy black and white look. The grain is of course a form of visual artefact - a distortion of the truth in reality. Today's technology now takes this many steps further with the equivalent of ISO 102,000 obtainable on some machines. A shot at ISO 6400 is now considered routine - affording incredible reportage wedding photography possibilities to the photographer - with no grain in sight.
At times the modern, digital photographer is asked to add a simulation of celluloid film grain to otherwise pristine photograph. Even though it can appear good, it is an intriguing reality of aesthetics that a photograph can appear alot more timeless and genuine with artefacts added to it.
Part of the maturation of reportage wedding photography has to be the evolution of the Wedding Album. Rather than present the married couple with a basic book with very best photos placed in order of preference, the wedding photographer's job now includes the design and layout of a book that well tell the story of the wedding. Photographs are placed in a digitally printed book, in chronological order. Each and every photo relates to each and every other photo as portion of a linear story, bringing vividly back the memories of the big day.
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