Enhancing Your Perceptive Abilities at Wedding Shoots

by David Beckstead

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“If the lines will not come to you, go to them – use them to search out your subject with your viewfinder.”

It is often good to see your wedding world with 16mm and 200mm eyes. I find it better to start each wedding location within the wedding day seeing in 16mm (the whole story and field of view). Then narrow your imagery down to 200mm to isolate subjects and pull-in emotion. The range of millimetres between are fine, yet I find going a little more extreme with my focal lengths can create very dynamic imagery.

Another way to become more aware happens before the wedding day as you surf the web looking for photographer websites and wedding images that impress you. I find I learn new tricks of understanding perception all the time. I don’t think I will top-out on my learning these concepts. Someone always helps me to see and go to new places with my imagery. Take a look at this site – www.admiredbybeckstead.com. I have taken the above paragraph to the extreme. Enjoy!

This is getting long! Other words to investigate with regard to increasing your perception have to do with naming compositional elements and what you do with them, such as; shape, form, organise, order, design, texture, colour, pattern, mood, emotion, interpretation, abstraction, contrast, latitude, interesting complexity, arranging picture elements and many more.

Learning perceptive abilities comes from within! Just copying other photographers’ abilities is a sure sign of stagnation. You should be excited to develop new levels of awareness at weddings on your own. Your imagery will improve dramatically by increasing your perceptive abilities. Just being able to see the light will crank your images to a new level of artistic creativity. [11]

Biography:

David Beckstead lives out-in-themiddle- of-nowhere in the Pacific Northwest, USA, but he and his wife Kassandra travel the world shooting destination weddings. David is known for his unusual compositional skills as seen at his website www.davidbeckstead.com Passion drives David to mix lifestyle with business to create an international style and brand. Wedding photography is his art form and weddings are his creative palette. David has been an active Digital Wedding Forum participant since 2000.

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Photo Quote: At forty-two I decided to become a photographer because it offered a means of creative thought and action. I didn't rationalize this, I just felt it intuitively and followed my intuition, which I have never regretted. - Wynn Bullock