Will Robb Photography

It’s funny how what you want to photograph changes over time.

A few years ago I really wasn’t interested in wedding photography. If someone asked me if I would shoot a wedding I wouldn’t do it at any cost. I wanted to travel off to remote places and do stories on interesting people and have an adventure. Weddings didn’t strike me as something I wanted to photograph, it appeared easy, kind of dull, not something that sparked any creative urges in me. Some of the wedding photography I’d seen in Japan especially made me cringe. Everyone had the same glum look, it looked more like the bride and groom were attending a funeral as the parents were thinking “I can’t believe they are getting married.” I spoke to some photographers here work for wedding firms and the job does sound horrendous. Each customer buys a package and the deal is that all photos in every package look the same. Same poses, same crops, photos taken in the same place, the only thing that’s different is the people in them. The photographers claimed they had no creative input into their shoots and if they dared differ from how they were told to shoot, they were kicked out of their jobs. It didn’t strike me as something I would want to get into.

However, after photographing a friends wedding last year in my own style, documenting the day and making a book as a gift for him and his wife I changed how I felt about the whole wedding photography game. Since then I’ve started to do a bit of wedding photography and I’m really enjoying it. You can treat it like a story for a magazine, the build up to the event, all the preparation that’s going in to getting ready, the bride and groom are the main characters with the guests playing a significant role in the proceedings, then you have the venue itself, the meal, the decorations, the flowers, the speeches, people getting more and more drunk and letting their hair down and having fun, all the way to the end of the day when everyone is exhausted and going home with a smile on their faces. It’s a lot more interesting that some post-marriage portraits of people with “What did I just do” looks on their faces. When you can document the whole day and wrap it up into a nice package and the happy couple are over the moon with the record they have of their big day, you go away feeling like you have done something worthwhile. The money isn’t bad either….

A couple of months ago I shot a simple wedding in Tokyo. Wasn’t anything fancy, just in a nice restaurant in a swish part of town. The couple, Kazunori and Keiko were really nice people who were really enjoying their big day and were happy to have a small group of family and friends around who they could share their day with. Everyone was really nice, maybe a bit shy at first as it was an all Japanese crowd and I stuck out like a sore thumb being the tall foreigner with the shaved head and a couple of cameras hanging round my neck, but after the first few drinks everyone was enjoying themselves too much to take any notice of me going around doing my thing. I have to say, I really enjoyed it and it made me determined to learn more about the art of wedding photography. I’ve been checking out different styles of wedding photography and I’ve been extremely impressed by the work done by a lot of Korean wedding photographers. They arrange amazing shoots pre-wedding that look like they could be spreads in Vogue whilst also providing excellent documents of the day. I wouldn’t mind spending a year or two in Seoul learning about wedding photography craft and also learning Korean. One day I’m going to move back to Europe and I think doing wedding photography for a stable source of income whilst continuing to do travel photography and some stories here and there wouldn’t be a bad thing.