Wedding photographer: How the number of guests influences wedding photography

A small wedding is more difficult to photograph than a large wedding. But wedding guests usually think it is the other way round.

Wedding photography must be very difficult with a large wedding like this?

If I had a penny for every time a wedding guest said something to this effect.

It's a common observation, but it is also a misconception. One might speculate it is because many people would be daunted by the prospect of standing in front of a hundred guests, maybe even two hundred, and asking everyone to smile and much else, but my kind of reportage wedding photography is not for the shy or faint hearted.

In my book, and I would think most other professional wedding photographers books too, the more guests there are the easier the photography is, and the fewer guests the harder it is to find natural happy spontaneous groups of people and individuals. There are quite simply more opportunities and combinations of different people as guests socialise and generally mingle at the larger weddings. It is also much easier to blend in and photograph people unawares, this gives by far the best and most natural looking results, most people just aren't very good at smiling to order and I include myself here too!

No, the hardest weddings to photograph are the very small ones. This is particularly true for reportage wedding photography where the real test of a reportage wedding photographers metal is to be found in such weddings. There is also great potential to stick out like a lemon unless you remember to pack a camouflage jacket with your light meter and sandwiches. But even this isn't straight forward and again tests the photographers metal - testing just how unobtrusive the photographer can be while still getting that shot? The smallest wedding I have photographed in recent years is twelve people in the Belvedere suite at Pembroke Lodge (it's in Richmond park in Surrey ), and that's including the bride and groom. It went very well, I gave the bride and groom loads of photographs, and when I delivered the photos the groom even said he had forgotten I was there during the wedding breakfast, I was so unobtrusive!