the daunting task of choosing wedding favorites

Nobody said this was easy: the 2012 edition

SO I sit here in my office the sunday before Christmas Eve and find that it’s an extremely quiet day – little to no email, ringing phone, messages…and even very little facebook activity!  I decided then, with the brief pre-Christmas peacefulness, to go through all of my wedding work from 2012 and try my best to choose some favorites. I do this every year so this is nothing new, and I always look upon it with a combination of  delight and apprehension. It’s really cool to go through an entire seasons worth of events and try and fish out your favorite images. But consider this: If I shoot about 30 or so weddings a year, I generally end up with, on the average, 2400 images per event. That’s about 72,000 images, not including engagement shoots, families, events, personal stuff (…between the Austria and Hawaii trips this summer, I probably have several thousand shots just there ALONE!!) So it’s a bit of a daunting task going through all of that and whittling it down to about 140 or so… …that’s like .189 percent or something nutty like that!

Sometimes i’m asked what makes an image special to me, especially since I “…go to SO MANY weddings…”, and that’s not an easy question. I guess they think that attending so many might dilute the feelings you come away with, yet I still leave each event with a very particular strong memory or feeling from it, and it’s completely different for all of them. It could be the location, lighting situation, weather, couple, particular special moment you ‘had to be there’ for, behind the scenes goings-on — the list is long. For me it’s not as simple as ‘I like this photo more than that one.’ In a way like when you look through a personal photo album and it conjures up  memories for you, so do my weddings, even though I was only involved in the photography. It’s more of a personal scrapbook for me than anything else.

But you really have to feel involved, to be a part of the day. You cannot just mindlessly wander through such a special occasion unaware of the emotion, moments and feelings. It’s being aware of that which, I think, makes you a better photographer. And so it’s those things that stick with me when I review a years worth of work.

And what makes it tough is that I give myself a final number to aim for -so I KNOW going in there are great images that will not get included. Of course i’m always worried someone will wonder ‘how come MY wedding is not in there?’, and I apologize in advance if that’s the case. I start with images from ALL my weddings and then chop it down which like I said, is the HARD part!

So please enjoy this for a little years-end recap – I hope you all have a great Holiday Season!

HERE is the link to the slideshow  (its 7:45 minutes , so grab a coffee…)