by Cara Mac Neil
When most people hear ‘paparazzi’ they think of tabloid magazines with dubious titles like “Who Secretly Married A Chimp?—Turn To Page 11” but there is one tiny little bit about them that we all forget about—while we see celebrities on movie screens and one-dimensional photographs those photographers are an arms length from them. They get to see beauty and glamor up-close and personal; it is their job to show that gilded lifestyle to the rest of the world. We crave the perfection, we yearn for the style, we lust after the thought that these are people (like us) and maybe we could look like that too.
A few years ago our studio went from taking pictures to creating an entire experience for our brides.
We have a small studio, only five girls on payroll under our co-owners, and averaging about fifty weddings a year. The benefit is twofold: we know the name, the story, and the style of every single bride we book; we also know one another inside and out. Paparazzi know where to find a movie star, what to say to make them turn this way or that way, they know where their light is and how to get that picture because they have seconds in-between Julia Roberts getting out of her car and into the restaurant and they won’t get a second chance at that moment.
Weddings are remarkably similar: we only get one day, one single day, to get every picture right and there are never second chances. If your photographer misses the kiss that first kiss between husband and wife you can never get it back—which is why we never miss it. On a wedding we stride into the bride’s house, analyze the status of make-up and hair, assess the rooms, watch the movement of light that goes unnoticed to everyone else in the house, and make our choices so that we get pristine images. Not just pristine—stunning.
We want our brides to feel like they are coasting down a red carpet all day. We want every shot to ooze Vogue and Cosmopolitan. We want every single smile they give us to glow with pride because they truly feel recognized and adored by the only people with them from the first bobby-pin to the last dance—their photographers. The pictures start before the groom is ever in attendance and after everyone else goes home our product is the one lasting souvenir (besides your husband). Think about it—the music ends, the food is eaten, the shoes get scuffed, the dress is bagged and saved in the hope that when your daughter is married some small part of it might be remotely in style, and you wash off the make-up, take down your hair. The one thing that you take off the shelf year after year to show your wedding frozen in time as a testament to your love is your wedding album.
There are two reasons every single person in our studio got into this business and the first reason is we spent endless hours as children staring at our parents’ wedding photos with a mixture of intense love and deep fascination—we were all in awe at the ability to share that wedding with our parents even though it happened years before we were born. We giggled at the dresses, laughed at the hair and make-up choices, we commented on how young mom looked (and what is going on with dad’s mustache?!) and, perhaps the most important thing, we were able to see photographs of those we no longer had with us. We would trace our little fingers over Grandpa’s eyes and remark that they looked precisely like ours. We all loved photography, weddings in particular, before we ever knew how to hold a camera.
The second reason we got into wedding photography is that we learned how to hold a camera by a man who refuses to accept anything less than perfection. Some might call our boss, the only man in the studio, hen-pecked but he adores his all-girl crew. He started as our teacher in high school and hand-picked the students who had a sharp enough eye to never miss a single shot, to never guess which lens we need or which pose works well in the light—he hand-picked the students who intuitively knew photography and he taught us weddings.
We come to every wedding with three people and surround a bride as her own private paparazzi. We remind her: you are the movie star, you are the focal point, the center of attention, and the camera loves you. There’s a simple formula for this feeling of elation we give to our brides: start with appreciating the beauty of every woman on her wedding day, add in the love of our craft, mix it with the complete comfort and ease that comes with working alongside people you identify as a second family, and voila—instant art that becomes yours forever.
