About our style & influences
When we first got into wedding photography, we were asked to photograph a friend’s friend’s wedding. She wanted to give the couple a wedding gift and hired us as photographers. We got a little pocket money for our work, but we got a chance to try out. We did a good job from the classic perspective, but we were not able to define our style at this time yet. We kind of did what we thought was expected or requested by couples who wanna have wedding pictures. In the end, our couple got this very classic, posed pictures and they were happy with it. But we were not. At that moment we couldn’t really express what we felt, but it felt wrong for us somehow.
Why did we feel like this? Well, to explain it, we need to tell you about the photography that we did before that wedding and the style in other genres that we developed over the years. Street photography is one of these examples for influencing genres. While traveling, or even in Dresden, we take pictures of people’s daily life, of simple moments in reality. It trained our eyes to observe and to anticipate interesting moments. It trained our choice of what we feel is interesting and important for us and for the viewer of the image.
Landscape photography is another photography genre that we did for years already before wedding photography. It taught us about patience and the right time. For just one picture, we’re sometimes waiting for hours or even for days. We often need to hike to remote places or stand uncomfortable weather conditions, like rain or extreme cold or wind. Landscape photography taught us also a lot about simplicity. That’s a matter of taste, but for us, less is more.
Also in art portrait photography, we went to the direction of real and emotional photography. When working with models, we learned about how to make any person in front of us feel comfortable and how to create an atmosphere of trust and honesty so that the person in front of our camera can show their real feelings. Portrait photography also taught us how to capture emotions in an artistic way, be creative and also how to realize our visions.
And after all these photography experiences and what we learned from these different genres, what we wanted was honest, simple and emotional pictures. We wanted to document peoples emotion, as real as possible. We wanted to observe our surrounding, not direct it, but still follow our vision.
We researched a lot about how to combine our documenting, journalistic way of photography with our wedding work. And indeed we found lots of inspiration from internationally renowned wedding photojournalists, like Mel DiGiacomo, Zalmy Berkowitz and Denis Reggies. We couldn’t stop inhaling all this amazing pictures from all these great journalists.
We basically got inspired to kind of “do our thing” as we saw there are people out there who like the same thing that we do. During our second wedding, we exactly did that: just our thing. Honest and real photography. Observing and documenting without directing and we were so much happier while taking the pictures and also later when delivering them.
Our confidence was increasing, because we did what we love. And that’s how we found our style. And still we learn and our style is still changing slightly, our skills improve, because in this life, we never stop learning and developing.