I guess I’m the one who has to defend blurry wedding photos.
The latest stupid trend to take over TikTok is blurry wedding photos. Intentional camera shake, dragged shutter, incoherent details. Interestingly these images all seem to achieve blur through shutter drag and not missed focus. But let’s not interrogate that line of thought too much- I think I’ll save it for when I come out with wedding photography’s Next Big Thing in a summer or two.
Depending on which influencer you ask, these images are either everything wrong with trend obsessed clout chasers, or a brand-new contemporary mode of artistic expression. They are neither. But that’s not a particularly useful answer, let’s examine where trends come from and why wedding photography is so susceptible to divisive styles.
History of intentional blur*
“It is everything wrong with photography. When we were taught taking a photo, it was a sharp, crisp, clear image, in focus. Now we have photographers that their entire gallery is out of focus.” Michael Cassara, Vendor Table Podcast
While Michael clarifies that he is specifically railing against unmotivated blur, (shots of static table settings and details of unmoving objects rendered incomprehensible by handshake) what the discourse on these images ignores (and what Michael’s allusion to his being taught photography reveals) is that intentional, unmotivated blur is not a new thing. In fact, it is almost as old as photography itself.
“There had been calls for diffusion [read: lens blur] to be introduced into photography as early as 1853, almost exclusively by artists in other media or art-critics, as a matter of producing artistic images.” William Russel Young, The soft-focus lens and Anglo-American Pictorialism.
Just twenty years after the invention of photography, a minority of artists who would become known as the Pictorialist movement had decided the bleeding edge of lens design was too sharp for their purposes. With each new development, more artistically inclined photographers began to seek out ways to soften the image. Continues Young,
“The real dawning of the medium was delayed until 1889 when there was a true revolution regarding the role of photography. A new attitude theorized that it could be art; perhaps in direct opposition to its previous role as science.”
This reasoning should be intuitive to many wedding photographers, almost all of whom sacrifice some form of image fidelity in the name of artifice, whether it is crushing dynamic range in editing, removing clinical sharpness, or adding grain.
The pictorialist inclination for soft focus has direct through-lines today, albeit from a different motivation. John Dallmeyer invented the first soft-focus lens, the Patent Portrait, in 1866 as a way to circumvent tedious retouching of portrait photographs. The soft focus look survived the 1930s, notably in the Leica Thambar, and in the 1950s Hasselblad documentation suggested that portrait photographers use their Softar filter to subdue the sharpness of their 120mm macro. The soft focus look has received a new lease in contemporary photography and videography in the black pro mist filter, a soft focus effect achieved through dark diffusion (read, tiny translucent spots) which renders a glow with more subdued highlights compared to traditional soft focus effects.
Soft focus is both mechanically and aesthetically different from shutter blur (the topic of today’s discussion), however, I want to draw another distinction between post and pre-capture artifice, which I believe better illustrates their shared motivation. Allusions to ‘art’ show up surprisingly frequently from Photographers taking chagrin in the comments of the Vendor Table Podcast’s Instagram post. I believe this is because modes of pre-capture artifice like soft focus and shutter blur feel inherently risky and artful. There is no editing your way back into sharp focus.
Whether wedding photographs can exhibit artfulness is a conversation outside of the scope of this article. But weddings and wedding photos are emotionally charged both for the subject and photographer. It is no surprise to me that aesthetic discussions can provoke such strong responses.
I believe wedding photos can be extremely compelling, even when you have no relationship to the couple depicted. Part of what makes artful wedding photography so challenging is that a wedding photographer is often asked to make magic weekend after weekend, with surprisingly little differentiating one wedding from the next.
Why blurry wedding photos are in right now
There are blurry photos in almost every wedding album ever produced. Predominantly they are attempts at a sharp image where the camera or photographer couldn’t keep up and yet something in the emotion of the moment redeems the image. These unintentionally blurry images have become increasingly uncommon as technology has improved and clinically sharp images have become more commonplace.
In such a landscape the blurry wedding photo provides several advantages:
- The implied motion gives a feeling of authenticity and candour to the image.
- Shy couples may prefer a less detailed representation of their faces (we all do sometimes)
- These images work well when displayed in rapid succession as is popular on tik tok, whereby only broad details can be distinguished
- Whether photographers realise or not, they are tapping into a vast history of intentional blur in photography as alluded in the pictorialism section
Do I, personally, hate blurry wedding photos? No more than any other trend. In my parents wedding album there are pages of underexposed sepia which we skip past, we seem only just out of blown highlights and egregious drone shots.
The bokehlicious Brenizer method seems to have finally hit its ebb now that iPhones can smear out backgrounds. Even the wedding images I love from Emin Kuliyev and Jeff Newsom have a distinctiveness of style which we may well put in a box and come to regard as quintessentially of-their-time in coming years.
If I had to hazard a guess I’d suggest that the motion blur trend originates from a larger trend of wedding photographers supplementing their services with film photography, and struggling with slow film in aperture priority exposure modes. This process would unfold in the same way that it has historically. Given limited options, a technically subpar image may still make it into the client gallery if it represents something of the emotion or dynamic of the event.
The trend may have originated from mistakes, but plenty of photographers are creating blurry images with digital cameras and decades of technology designed to render as sharp and clean as possible. In my article on the Lifestyle Point and Shoot I pointed to Elena Caoduro’s analysis in Photo Filter Apps: Understanding Analogue Nostalgia in the New Media Ecology, where she suggests:
“Both analogue and digital photography conjure the past, but instagrammed photos graphically age our captured moments to show the here and now as a past for which we are already nostalgic. This simulated physicality of instagrammed photos represents a way to stay connected with the past, generate comfortable memories, and display authentic slices of the immediate past.” Elena Caoduro, Photo Filter Apps: Understanding Analogue Nostalgia in the New Media Ecology
This analysis of instagram filters translates readily to blurry photos. By employing the same markers, contemporary images can call back to, and insert themselves among historical images which have stood the test of time in spite of technical flaws. Our most treasured family images are often not remembered for their superior quality. By echoing the same pretensions of amateurism, of spontaneity and compromise, the image suggests that there is something more essential and raw which supports its inclusion in the album (or web gallery, instagram post).
How does wedding photography become so dependent on trends?
Where these images depart from standard contemporary wedding imagery is in some ways less interesting than how they conform: The black point is still raised, the white point lowered, mid-tone contrast is accentuated and colours are pushed warm and shifted slightly green. If the trend of blurry photos in any way distinguishes itself from film photography, it is not through its origins nor aesthetics.
Wedding photographers straddle a difficult line between documentation and artifice. Capture too little of the day and you haven’t done your job, capture it too literally and you won’t get hired. I remember when I first helped out with a full time wedding photographer as a teenager we did three weddings in the same venue within a fortnight. The photographer worked hard to make sure no two couples got the same exact shot, pose, or background. This is in part how trends develop. The supply of artifice which abstracts but still satisfactorily depicts a scene is limited.
Moreover, new couples’ expectations are set by a network of tastemakers which is itself mostly ignorant to photographers’ working methods. Between magazines and blogs who need compelling and exciting imagery; couples who want photography which suits their taste; and photographers with their own preferences and style, the images themselves are pulled by competing interests.
The answer, of course, is what photographers have been doing forever. Delivering around 25% of the gallery in a stylised manner, and giving the remaining 75% attention and style, but prioritising clarity, context and detail. I would be surprised to find a successful wedding photographer who does not employ a version of this strategy.
Conclusion and some new trend suggestions for enterprising wedding photographers.
Those who refuse to learn history are doomed to repeat it. I hope this article has shed some light on how the blurry wedding photos conversation is really two conversations. Why on the one hand are wedding photographers so dependent on trends? And further, what role does artifice play in the wedding photographer’s toolbox?
On the one hand, wedding photographers are rarely given the privilege of setting their clients’ expectations, receiving instead secondhand ideas from fashion magazines who are incentivised to promote a constant cycle of new trends.
There is no immediate fix to this, but wedding photographers would do well to try as best they can to promote transparency about their process. It may feel good to have a bit of magic and majesty in your black box process, but a client who knows that you are being honest about your work is more likely to ask for what they actually want, rather than trying to guess their way into it via whatever trends show up on their social media feeds.
Finally, I will concede that I find handheld shots of wedding details shot at 1/15 incredibly stupid. As photographers we will always have a bag of tricks which we hope will bring some joy to our day and images. However, the art of wedding photography will always be in your relationship with your couple, the emotion of the event, and your ability to see and artistically interpret what is in front of you.
But if that sounds too difficult and you’d rather get ahead of whatever the next trend is for a couple months of instagram clout, here are my predictions. Feel welcome to use them to great acclaim and profit:
Zero dynamic range: Gen Z are abandoning their film cameras in favour of Sony Cybershots. Give them what they’re familiar with by crushing your shadows and white point into oblivion. Watch Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room if you think it can’t be done.
Bring back the Unsharp Mask: We’re nearing twenty years from the original sharpness mania, and it’s time to bring the haloes and bold black outlines back. Even better, once this trend dies we may finally be able to accept that lens sharpness reached acceptable levels decades ago, and retire the Siemens star forever.
Not even attending the wedding: Everyone’s on their phone anyways, so why ask everybody in the audience to put down their camera just for your sake? Take the day off and crowdsource the wedding photography to those who are most excited about it: The uncles with really nice cameras. Maybe you’ll need to be on standby for when portrait mode blurs out aunt Vera, or when the buildup of lint on cousin Anthony’s iPhone camera causes so much ghosting as to render the entire scene incoherent. #retro.
*This section draws almost whole cloth from William Russel Young’s PhD thesis, The soft-focus lens and Anglo-American pictorialism. The piece is an excellent resource for the motivating factors and personalities of the pictorialism movement, and my cribbing of his work is only an incredibly cursory overview.
