Keith Beard Photography specialises in Modern Reportage Wedding Photography, offering coverage in the North East Of England, as well as throughout the UK, Scotland, Wales and Ireland with experience of over 600 weddings in my career to date, setting ourselves apart from the competition with our own photographic style of covering a wedding with photography that is the most creative and original.
With a unique style which started in the mid-nineties, being one of the first photographers to introduce reportage wedding photography in the North East Of England, helping pioneer the way forward for today’s modern style of wedding photography away from the old set style of traditional wedding photography. A totally different approach to wedding photography back then was under taken, our photography was very relaxed and natural, starting with preparations of the bride and groom getting ready, and continued throughout the day and evening usually until first dance, gone was the dreaded 2 hours of line up after line up of family group shots, this was reduced to under 10-15 minutes, leaving the whole wedding party time to relax and enjoy the event, as it should be, resulting in more casual photographs of people generally having more fun. Our fashion photography experience was implemented into this new style, especially with the bride and groom, making them feel special like real photographic models with images to match. Within a few years of showing the way forward in this new style of photography with weddings, the regions other wedding photographers soon started to try and dublicate what we were doing, though struggled to match the high standards and creative style set, a new era of wedding photography was born, which soon became known as “reportage” wedding photography.
As the years have moved on and with the introduction of digital camera’s this new reportage wedding photography style has seen major changes, some good and some bad. On the positive side, the freedom and expression digital camera’s have given wedding photographers compared to film has actually helped improve wedding photography standards to a degree, and on the negative side, basically a person with little or no experience can go out and buy a digital camera and call themselves a wedding photographer, not having trained the old fashioned way with a professional wedding photographer or with film, where you had to make each shot count, where you learned your own unique photographic style, and your split second timing of pressing the camera’s shutter button, which is this point, and this point alone in all photography that defines an average photographer from a exceptional photographer! Many of today’s “wedding photographers” boast that they take thousands of shots per wedding, using the camera’s motor drive to cover the wedding’s photography almost with what they record becoming similar to video, where many multiple shot’s are recorded per second to enable these “photographers” to get one good shot out of dozens, this type of wedding photography is classed as “happy snapping” not “real” reportage photography.
Todays reportage wedding photography, from my point of view as someone who was involved from the start of the transition from traditional to reportage has come full circle in the last several years, every wedding photographer out there is copying what the next one is doing, certain shot’s and poses replicated again and again, I feel reportage wedding photography has become what basically traditional wedding photography used to be, and what the first reportage wedding photographers were trying to get away from, with the same replicated shot’s and poses that each photographer did week in, week out, the stale cheesy images and poses have not progressed much further in the last several year period, where the lack of real wedding photography experience from some of these “wedding photographers” has made for more quackier and sillier images/poses which if you pause for a moment and think “what has this pose, the wedding photographer is making us do - got to do with a real wedding?” Images of the bridal party holding hands in a line running across a field then jumping in the air….. You wouldn’t do this normally at a wedding so why do it because a wedding photographer has asked you to do it? It is this type of “wedding photographer” who have not put the time and experience in to qualify for the proclaimed title of a professional wedding photographer, these negative points make wedding photography a minefield for potential wedding couples seeking a reputable professional creative wedding photographer that won’t disappoint them on one or thee most special days of their lives. These are some of the reasons I’ve always kept a low profile where other wedding photographers are concerned, not being part of photographic associations which you can easily join for a price like any union and not entering photographic competitions where your own hard work and genuine idea’s would be copied which would not be unique to yourself or your clients anymore.
If you would like to be photographed naturally as you enjoy your wedding day in a stylish, contempory and classy manner, free from interference and peace of mind knowing your in safe experienced hands... then you have found that photographer... Keith Beard Photography!
