The Three Generations

Without a doubt, this photo is one of my favorites ever, oh yeah!

I know it does not have a great composition, the light is just average, but the moment here wins everything. As the title of the photo says, here we have three people in the photo, three women from the same family: from the left, the mother of the bride, the grandmother, and the bride. I took this picture around 3-5 minutes after the end of the ceremony, while the couple received hugs from their families.

I always shoot many photos during a wedding, about the couple, their relatives and close friends, the location, the mood of the event, the joy, the party, the emotions, and many more things. But unless there is a visually worthwhile photo, I am always focused on capturing real and authentic moments of what is happening, or the moments between moments!

When moments like these happen, my camera and my body are immediately attracted to it like a magnet :-)

As soon as I perceived the scene, I started shooting like crazy, walking and shooting at the same time while I approached them. And this photo was one of the last pictures of the sequence I took of this authentic interaction of the three women, before they noticed it and obviously changed their attitude.

This kind of photo has an incredible value for the whole family: the daughter, the mother, and the mother’s mother, all in the same picture and all with expressions of pure happiness. I also love the contact they had with their hands, and without losing their gaze, they hug with great appreciation, it shows how much they love each other.

This, without a doubt, is what I look for in every photo, moments like these, with incredible value, that last in time, that transcend.

Those organic and authentic details are my eternal quest! And it’s thanks to photos like this that I enjoy so much of working with a documentary wedding photography style.

That’s why I’m convinced that the coverage of a documentary wedding photographer should be very similar to the approach of photojournalism with any other important assignment, just because both are real-life events that only happen once.

A documentary wedding photographer is often referred to as ‘wedding photojournalist’ or ‘reportage wedding photographer’ however they all refer to the same thing - an unadulterated observational approach to photographing a wedding.

Thus, shooting in a candid way implies that my documentary wedding photography is created with honesty, recording the events as they unfold without any interference or adulteration, capturing the right moment to tell the story in an honest way... or as I nominate it:

Honest Visual Storytelling

In this case, I was lucky enough to cover this modern Jewish Cabo wedding at El Ganzo facilities, and I must say they are a lovely family! The signs of love between these three generations are memorable!