The art is in those details people say are ‘unimportant’.
True artistry is a battle you choose to fight every day.
A very unimportant detail on the getting-ready location of the Bride.
Recently I received a lovely message from the organization World’s Best Wedding Photographers on a random Saturday, inviting me to join their registry. It came as a bit of a shock but also as an oasis amidst the desert. It made me realize a lot of things about the ongoing process of becoming a photographer and how our small daily battles become big in the grand scheme of things. How the biggest impact comes from the little moments folks can’t see and the internal battles we fight every day to keep our dreams alive.
Refining a wedding photography service is a huge challenge, there are a lot of variables in how you want to choose to operate. There are some things that other people may teach you but it mostly comes down to how you as an artist or service provider want to operate. You also have the variables of your own personal life and personal values, if you are willing and able to make them a part of your business or even if you want to do that at all.
Many of my processes have always been questioned by friends, family and colleagues. A lot of people call me exaggerated or over the top for being so detail oriented while delivering. So many of my photography acquaintances question why I don’t just hire third party services to fulfill orders more quickly or why I don’t use AI selection programs that could save me a few hours. It’s not that I think help is inherently bad, teams are a good part of businesses (Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel alone) and a crucial part of growth. I am sure I will one day need a team to be able to keep growing.
However, now is not the time for me to be worried about efficiency.
This logic fails to understand that my focus is not on being a business. My focus as a photographer is not that I *am* a photographer, but that there are values I want to communicate through the art of photography in the lives of people whom I photograph. My goal is not the photo, but what the photo represents for my clients’ most special moments. Their legacies, their loved ones, the finite fabric of reality that we seem so desperate to hold on to. My focus has never been on what other photographers do, who’s cool or who isn’t, other people’s pricing, what trends everyone is posting or who has got more dates booked. All those things are part of my surroundings, but they are very far from what I focus on.
People act in a way where they don’t demonstrate any value for details, while they also post a very romantic ‘details’ shot on their profile. Oxymoron is an understatement.
Wedding details are not shoes, jewelry, invitations or flowers. A detail at a wedding is the fact that your grandma lined up at the very edge of the church bench to see you exit as a newlywed. Another wedding detail might be that your dad stayed on a corner of the room when you did your bridal portraits to take it all in and he choked up and cried a single tear. A cool detail is that the groom’s wedding pants came undone because he danced so hard on the dancefloor celebrating his new union. Those, those are the details I like and look for. Of course.. we also love some really pretty shoes- not gonna lie here. My point is that they are not the most important thing and they are very far from it.
You cannot say you are detail oriented while interrupting a dad putting on his son’s bow tie just for you to say “okay now act like you are fixing it” in a customer service voice. I have also been guilty of this, do not worry. It is not that I feel disdain for these practices, just that I have seen better and want to do better than that.
So, amid your lookout for a photographer or in learning as a photographer yourself, remember that our legacies and achievement of true value-driven artistic endeavors depend on those things 95% of people deem as unimportant.
This is your sign to focus not on what other deem as important, but what YOU as a creative qualify as important.
