Anatomy of an Image #2

Upset Flower Girl

One of the main reasons I love photographing with two photographers is for photos like this. At this wedding my assistant, Nate, was working creating formal portraits with some of the family members.  With many studios, the primary photographer handles the formal portraits while the assistant photographs candids and details, but that isn’t how I like to work.
 
These days I mostly photograph with my wife, Carin.  She will handle many of the group formals. Her excellent attention to detail makes her well suited for those types of images.  While she is doing that, I am free to be on the look out for moments like the one in this image. This was not a complicated image.  It was just a matter of having an assistant photographing the formals that left me free to look around for a special moment.
 
 

No Perfect Pictures

Photographer, Joe Buissink, once said to me, “There are no perfect pictures, only perfect moments.”  Photographers can really get lost in a statement like that.  When I first heard him say it, I had only photographed a handful of weddings.  I thought that it was my job to create moments.  However, after I had photographed a hundred or more weddings, I realized that was not the case at all.  Perfect moments are all around us, and nowhere more than at a wedding.
 
This image is a prime example. It was a perfect moment that I was able to photograph before she became aware that I was there. The result was an image that was not only one of the client’s favorite images from the day, it was also one of mine, and won numerous awards, including an Accolade of Excellence from the WPPI International Print competition.