BIPP and beyond!

OK, as you may or may not know I am a Licenciate of the British Institute of Professional Photography - this is THE qualification to have if one is serious about their work - when I worked for Max I realised how professional it looked to have the letters LBIPP (ABIPP or FBIPP) after ones name - maybe not to Joe Public who might not of heard of the BIPP, but certainly to other photographers. It's not just about fancy letters after your name, its a sign that you have reached a certain standard in your photography - they dont let any old Tom, Dick or Harry in y`know!

However, I am now looking at progressing onto my Associateship, the second level of qualification. With some of the work I have produced this year, I am quietly confident that I can at least make a good impression with the judges.

The BIPP have already run an interview/case study with me earlier this year - which brings a surprising amount of traffic to my website.

I think towards the end of the year I will post a `best of` gallery to get everyone else's opinion. With the grading interviews in April of next year, I have to start thinking which ones to use.

Wish me luck!

Reportage vs Formals vs Art

One thing this year that has been playing on my mind a bit is regarding Reportage v Formals - now I am not a big fan of the word `reportage`, its been thrown around amongst wedding photographers both good and bad and during the past few years & the whole concept has become somewhat diluted - clients or potential clients will approach me, whether it be after meeting me at an exhibition, finding my website or being referred to me from another couple whose wedding I have shot and they say they want the reportage style of wedding shoot - but when I say "fine, that means you dont want any group shots or posed formals" they generally say "oh yes, we want those as well" - which isn`t really a reportage wedding.

If you'll allow me to expand on that a bit -

The problem stems from photographers and their web galleries - when a bride (or groom, but usually the bride) is reading up on wedding photography they visit all these websites and see these wonderful `reportage` slideshows showing about 15 or so images from a single wedding, backed with a nice snip of emotive piano music and the initial impact is usually "WOW!" - and they do look great, simple & effective, showing tiny snapshots of the day and making the whole slideshow `pop` with some nifty photoshopping and cool black and white effects. The only problem with that is the prospective client wouldn't only want to be presented with 30 or so `reportage` images for their many hundreds or even thousands of pounds spent. It’s a problem I have been wrestling with all year - do I present less images? do I cut out my DVD package and not allow the client to see,literally, hundreds of shots of the day and just send the couple a proof of the album and my interpretation of the day? Or do I post 600 shots on my website so they can see every tiny thing we captured? I like to think of my style as 65% "reportage", 35% formals - and by formals I don't mean lots of group shots, I am talking about the artistic couple shots which are posed but not in a contrived 1980s style - I like to bring the essence of the couple into my formals, integrating the venue, the weather, the lighting and some love and personality - but when that’s tied in with some nice reportage it can make for an amazing album, something you can pull out on a cold winters night whilst sitting in your lounge and relive the day through 20 pages of well picked, tastefully laid out photographs, in fact, something you can pull out in ten years time with your kids on your lap and they will say "wow Mummy you look so pretty".

I think within the next few years I will drop the number of images shown in my online galleries from 500 or so now, down to 250 - I certainly don`t want to end up turning into some `hack` photographer treating every wedding like a souless product on a production line just so I get my paydirt - thankfully I know I will never get to that stage , but looking at a lot of photographers out there it seems, sadly, that the way it is going for some of them. Anyone who knows me, friend, family or client will know I have an absolute passion for photography, whilst this is a job for me, I still have that fire in my belly to become great within my field and respected by my peers. I just want to produce work that will tingle emotions in ten, twenty or even thirty years from now when my clients look at their wedding album.

Thanks for reading.