So the Advice ‘Make Sure Your Photographer is Familiar with Your Venue’, is, I’m Just Gonna Say It, Absolute Nonsense I’m Afraid…

The Truth About Wedding Articles is that while they will contain a certain amount of useful information a lot of it will simply be filler to justify the article’s existence, or to act as dressed-up click-bait.

As a photographer, I find the most infuriating piece of ‘advice’ is one that almost all articles carry.  Saying something along the lines of Make Sure Your Photographer is Familiar with Your Venue.

This is nonsense.  Any photographer who can’t assess your venue in seconds on the day should be in a different line of work.  The essential message of ‘Make Sure Your Photographer is Familiar with Your Venue’ is to telling you to book a jobbing photographer who is happy to repeat themselves and will simply slot you into pre-existing shots they’ve done time and tine again.  Familiarity is not fresh, it’s not exciting or innovative, it’s treadworn and complacent.  If an article tells you that the photographer needs to be familiar with the venue’s lighting think about the British weather for a moment.  It changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour.  What the light looks like on the visit may well be very different to the light on your wedding day itself.

A good photographer is reactive, works in the moment and is not arriving to your day with a lazy set-list of what worked before.  I mean that’s okay if you want your standard ‘We got married, here are photos of us getting married’ images.  But if you want something more, something approaching art.  Something unique to you and your day, forget about whether your photographer has been to your venue.  There’s a good chance it will be more of a negative than a positive.  Personally I do my best work if I’m completely fresh to a venue or have shot there less than a handful of times.  Because it’s new, just like it is for the bride and groom.

Equally, I have shot weddings in America, Australia, Hong Kong, St Tropez.  It’s not possible to fly out and visit those places in the week ahead.  But neither is it necessary.  True documentary photography is about ‘the decisive moment’ to quote the late great Cartier-Bresson.  But mostly it’s about you and your guests.  My job is to capture the people, the faces, the emotions, the story of the day.  None of that can be prepped for by turning up in advance and wandering around the venue.  It helps if you want the wedding co-ordinator to go ‘A lot of photographers like to pose the bride and groom on this staircase,’ which, even if you want that shot, will take ten seconds to assess on the day itself.  But I’m also guessing if you’re reading this blog you want something a little bit different and if you do you really don’t need make a site visit any kind of factor.

It may be that your photographer has shot at your venue before.  Nothing wrong with that–unless they’re a venue stalwart and then you might want to flip the question and ask them how they manage to stay fresh…  But a good photographer really doesn’t need to have shot at a venue before.  A documentary photographer is there to capture your day as it happens, not take promo shots for the venue.  I guarantee you ‘Make Sure Your Photographer is Familiar with Your Venue’ was not written by a photographer or videographer or anyone actively involved with creating the images you’ll want to cherish for the rest of your lives.  It was written by someone tasked with regurgitating a tired article for the 100th time.  Probably in between looking through Vinted or checking their latest Fantasy Football League standings or doom scrolling through social media posts.

The problem is, none of this is your fault.  The chances are you’re doing this for the first time and you just need some guidance about what to look for and, on the surface of it, Make Sure Your Photographer is Familiar with Your Venue, sounds reasonable.  But as a photographer it’s really quite a depressing question to be asked. Because immediately you know you’re going to have to tread carefully and tactfully around a discussion that, ultimately, doesn’t mean anything at all but that’s now going to carry an unnecessary, dispiriting weight in the client’s selection process. It means a photographer that might have been perfect for them now stands a good chance of being ruled out because they’re not local, hasn’t shot there before or has better things to do than visit the venue to appease some bogus bullet point peddled by some bored intern–if it hasn’t just been rehashed by a disembodied AI bot that doesn’t even have the facility to get bored, of course.

Here’s the simplest list I can think of:

• Can you afford the photographer?  Are they within your budget or perhaps worth adjusting your budget for?
• Ask to see an entire gallery of their images from one or two weddings.  Not just the cherry-picked blogs, but the whole thing.
• Have a quick Zoom chat to make sure both sides click.
• If you really do click but are worried their prices are slightly out-of-reach, have that conversation.  Be prepared for them to say ‘No, those are my prices.’  But equally you never know.  It goes both ways.  If the photographer thinks you gel and you’re going to have an amazing wedding that they’d love to photograph they might allow for a little wiggle-room.  They might not, of course.  But it’s a thin-skinned ego who’s upset by that conversation.
• Ask them if they’re purely documentary or happy to shoot a few formal images.  (Hint, the answer to the second one should be yes.  You don’t want someone with an ego who thinks this is war photography with nice dresses.)

And that’s really it.  The list wouldn’t make for a great article on wedding photography.  But then it doesn’t need to bulk itself out with needless filler to justify print-costs or the banner content on the website.

The following images were all shot at a wedding in Nashville, USA at the end of last year.  I arrived the day before, jet-lagged out the wazoo.  They start at the wedding venue and end in a brilliantly raucous bar off the main drag on Broadway.  A recce would have been impossible and, really, totally beside the point, and I love these images.  And more importantly, so did the bride and groom.