Seeing the light, seeing the moment….
“Why do I need a photographer when everyone’s got a camera in their phone?”
This is a question I hear bandied about a lot and in fact someone on an online forum posted this – “we are planning our wedding and want more naturalistic story-telling photo so we are thinking of asking guests to just use their phones and post the pictures to a WhatsApp group. Do we also need a photographer?” My response was (obviously) YES! and here are some reasons why.
Light
The word “photograph” means “drawing with light” and most people who use cameras or phones are not aware of the importance of light in an image. They take photographs but are not photographers – sorry if that comes across as a bit patronising. Good light can turn an ordinary image into something striking and artful. In order to capture images like this, the photographer needs to “see” the light – this is a matter of experience and creativity, knowing where to position the camera and how to read the environment. Sometimes sources of light are not that obvious.
Camera
Possibly the most obvious difference! Most phones have excellent cameras….but they all have built-in limitations which work against any creative choice beyond where you point the camera. Firstly phone cameras perform poorly in low light. In order to acquire a low light image, the light signal is amplified which generates grainy noise, so less detail and bad colour reproduction. Nearly all phones these days get around that by computational (and AI) noise reduction – looks great on a small screen but in print or on a large screen the image will look pasty or like plastic. Many phones have a “night mode” which basically opens the shutter for longer. This means that anything which moves will be blurred. Added to this phones will process an image using their own built in algorithms, you have no creative input. OK the JPEG image cam be edited, but JPEGs are fragile and easily broken.
Action
Every guest at a wedding these days uses their phone to take pictures….but usually they are used to take group or individual portraits. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone use their phone to take candid images and there may be good reasons for this. Phones are actually quite good for candid photography in one way, because they are ubiquitous, part of the furniture of modern life. Everyone has one but nobody sees them. So pointing a phone at a stranger for either a photo or video would not raise an eyebrow. I know because I have done it. The downside, at least from my point of view, is the ergonomics of using a phone camera. The phone unexpectedly goes into standby and by the time you have woken it up and set up the camera, you have lost the moment. Again a lack of creative control might compromise your ability to capture an image of a moving subject because shutter speed is very difficult to control.
So there you have it. Relying on guests taking snaps with their phones will give you some great portrait images but will not tell the real story of your wedding, and whilst the images might look great on the phone, they might not bear being viewed on a large screen or as a print.
