Our passion here at Ben Viljoen Photography burns heavily on the photo-journalistic side of things, and although I do realise that we create some kick-ass portraits, it is really capturing the actual, real, un-staged moments during the wedding day that gets us going in the morning.
I often get confused looks at meetings when I mention the term “wedding photojournalism”, and to be frank, it seems like it can mean pretty much anything, so I will explain here what it means to me and to the studio, and ultimately what you can expect to see in your wedding album.
I am already married. I had my wedding day and it was totally awesome and I got the T-shirt and I have no intentions of doing it again. I say that because once I start to interfere with a wedding day as a photographer, it sort of becomes my wedding with the couple merely being actors in my own story, which is really the last thing I want to do. Wedding times are way too special to reduce it to merely a “based on a true story” film (btw, I am not a very good film director anyway).
I would much rather that the couple get married, have the (fill in the blank with whatever you want your wedding to be like) time of their life, and we as photographers will play the role of journalists, telling the real story of the day with our mega pixel monsters, and preserving one of the news headlines of your life by means of a book.
In years to come while strolling down memory lane, a welcome friend named Wedding Album will meet up with you and greet you with some honest moments from special times gone by, and usually so with a firm handshake of sweet nostalgia.
