2006 Best Wedding Photos

April 25, 2006 7:36 AM

Top KnotsWeddings, no matter how grand, are comprised of many intimate, unforgettable moments, and wedding photographers have just one chance to capture them. The judges of this year's Top Knots competition felt that the work featured in this online gallery succeeded in preserving these moments in a creative and innovative way.
posted by ColdChef (32 comments total)

that beats the CRAP out of any wedding photos I've seen/been in. Holy cow!
posted by indiebass at 7:44 AM on April 25, 2006

wow, NICE. These actually tell stories.
posted by casarkos at 7:48 AM on April 25, 2006

The one with the sign "Bride's Family" pointing to the cows cracked me up. These were quite good for the most part.
posted by Eekacat at 7:54 AM on April 25, 2006

One my my first paying jobs a million years ago was shooting weddings. I still get that heaving sensation when I think about it. You're right about the"one chance to capture" concept. If you blow it, the customer, the customer's family, and all their friends will blame you for ruining their special day (and probably jinxing the marriage.) The rest of your life won't be worth living.

At my first wedding I discovered a feature of the Rolleiflexes my employer used: you'll bork the shutter if you change the speed after it's been cocked. I went through three Rolleis that day. What a nightmare! I'm going to go and throw up now.
posted by 327.ca at 7:54 AM on April 25, 2006

I love the one with the little boy sitting on a ledge looking very fed up. can't figure out how to link to it directly, but these are truely lovely pictures
posted by darsh at 7:59 AM on April 25, 2006

Fun. But brief.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:14 AM on April 25, 2006

Great stuff. My father worked as a wedding photographer in the 80's. He was very glad to stop doing it after a while, the stress was so intense. That said, these are great images, great sense of the moment.
posted by bullitt 5 at 8:19 AM on April 25, 2006

It it still okay to complain about sites that completely based in Flash for no good reason?

It's not like "Next" and "Prev" buttons are impossible in HTML...

But yeah, some great pictures.
posted by unixrat at 8:19 AM on April 25, 2006

unixrat: Yeah, and no preloading of images. Grrr...
posted by Jofus at 8:21 AM on April 25, 2006

Some interesting pictures, annoyingly served through craptastic Flash.
posted by paulsc at 8:31 AM on April 25, 2006

My wedding photographer took all these awful "Party Pics." He missed ALL of the "once-in-a-lifetime" moments. Truly awful.

Three months after my wedding, a friend who had been there with his digital camera sent me a disc of his shots, and they were amazing. He even got a shot of me with my grandfather, two months before he died.

His shots are the pictures I'll treasure forever.
posted by ColdChef at 8:38 AM on April 25, 2006

Google eloped to see my wedding photos. That's a decision I'll never regret.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:45 AM on April 25, 2006

These actually tell stories.

That's the trick with photographing weddings: be there and be aware. The photographer should shoot plenty of film (not fiddle with poses and equipment), and be at the wedding before, during, and after to capture those fleeting moments. Great candids will generate a lot more smiles and tears for years than any posed shots.
posted by cenoxo at 8:46 AM on April 25, 2006

Our posed shots, while lovely, were boring. Our favorites are the candids by far - our niece peeking through the curtain before showtime, our parents laughing, a shot of my sister-in-law tossing a child around, people goofing off at the tables. Much more fun.
posted by agregoli at 8:50 AM on April 25, 2006

Oh, those were fun. The "cheers" with sippy cup is priceless.
posted by dejah420 at 9:00 AM on April 25, 2006

Totally agree on the candids (feels strange as a brit calling them that but hey) being the ones that you cherish far longer than the posed shots. At our wedding we had a guy round all day just snapping away, think he ended up with about 500 shots which we could choose 150 as part of the package we'd bought. Ended up getting nearly all of them and scoping back on the posed photos.
posted by lloyder at 9:00 AM on April 25, 2006

The one photo from my wedding that I love is a posed group shot in which my Maid of Honor has this horrified expression on her face and I'm grinning from ear to ear. She'd just found a foreign object on the front of her dress and I had explained that it was a memento left by a child with a runny nose who had just hugged her. It still cracks me up.
posted by onhazier at 9:35 AM on April 25, 2006

Our posed shots, while lovely, were boring. Our favorites are the candids by far.....

At the risk of being self-promoting ....

Although I'm far from a professional photographer, I can take a good picture now and again, and last fall I shot some photos of a friend's (very low budget) wedding as a gift.

Compare, if you will:
posed
candid

posed
candid

Honestly, who looks like they're having a better time?
posted by anastasiav at 10:42 AM on April 25, 2006

At my bestfriend's wedding, they hired a photo journalist who had worked at the FreeP? for many years. In the event I can convince a woman to get married, I'll opt for the same route. The pictures were candid, (some posed of course) as well as unique. He took an awesome "Reservoir Dogesque" picture of the groomsmen that beats all. IIRC he took approximately 3000 pictures which they got to keep, as well as presenting his 'top 500.'
posted by AllesKlar at 10:54 AM on April 25, 2006

Surprisingly nice pictures.

I've been to a wedding where they just left disposable cameras everywhere, and asked people to take pictures. Seems like a good idea to me, probably get a few gems.
posted by Packy_1962 at 11:13 AM on April 25, 2006

unixrat: Yeah, and no preloading of images. Grrr...

Yeah, the half second it took for each image to load was a real hardship.

Though some of these photos are touching, I can't help but remember that a good portion of these marriages will someday end in divorce. That kind of ruins it for me. Maybe it shouldn't.
posted by DieHipsterDie at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2006

Packy, the most recent wedding I've been to had the same. Haven't seen the pictures yet, though (I'm looking at YOU, NortonDC and onlyconnect).
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:55 PM on April 25, 2006

adorable photos, anastasiav. and the candids are great!
posted by pinky at 1:33 PM on April 25, 2006

Candids are the way to go but try convincing the bride's mom that she's paying $6k for party photos....
posted by photoslob at 1:44 PM on April 25, 2006

btw - winners Andrew Niesen and Rachel LaCour Niesen are damn good photographers outside the wedding world.
posted by photoslob at 1:51 PM on April 25, 2006

Great find. . thanks for sharing.
posted by Danf at 2:00 PM on April 25, 2006

Anastasiav: Honestly, who looks like they're having a better time?

Well, none of the photos you linked looked remotely candid to me.
posted by The Monkey at 2:33 PM on April 25, 2006

Candids are the way to go but try convincing the bride's mom that she's paying $6k for party photos.... - photoslob

Good argument for paying for it yourself - which is becoming more common anyway.
posted by raedyn at 3:01 PM on April 25, 2006

I've been to a wedding where they just left disposable cameras everywhere, and asked people to take pictures. Seems like a good idea to me, probably get a few gems.

A very few gems... out of 25 cameras at five or six bucks apiece and then processing... for the ones that actually don't walk off with guests. This is one of those ideas that is nice in theory but always ends up to be one cute picture of your grandma and then 250 prints of drunken groomsmen, children snapping the floor, and dim blurry pics from 25 yards back of the bride and groom on the dance floor.

Better to spend that money on a couple of Polaroids and film, and pay two sober teenagers to stop each guest and snap them as they arrive at the reception. It's also pictures, it's also casual and interactive -- and if you leave markers out, the guests can write a message to you on the Polaroid that will make any ordinary guest book seem like an uninspired church register.

~ Signed, the Bridesmaid Sick of Monitoring-Disposable-Camera-Duty
posted by pineapple at 3:14 PM on April 25, 2006

Did the disposable camera thing at my own wedding. Also ran around with a camera myself (I love to take pictures!) The disposable cameras actually did turn out several gems, so I think they were worth it. At other peoples' weddings I follow the photographer around, and take shots at either different angles or when people are not posing. Love the results of the unexpected. These are beautiful pictures...thank you so much for this link!
posted by annieb at 4:45 PM on April 25, 2006

I took photos at a friend's wedding recently, and she ended up purchasing very few prints from the photographer whose time she paid for, because my photos were apparently so much better (even though I was just running around taking snapshots!). It's surprising how many wedding photographers are really bad at what they do, but hoodwink their clients by looking impressive by carrying around lots of gear they don't actually have any skill in using. (Also this wedding, if you're a martyr for punishment.)
posted by dmd at 7:29 PM on April 25, 2006

As someone who spent an obscene amount of time recently shopping around for a wedding photographer, I really enjoyed these. It was gratifying, too, to see a local photographer who made my short list (but who was booked for my wedding date) all over the site.

Great photos!
posted by wildeepdotorg at 10:33 AM on April 26, 2006