"Anyway I'd love to read some comments good and and bad and thank you for taking the time to look."
Bearing in mind that I'm not in competition with you - different continents - and that I have no vested interest in destroying your business, and comparing these samples with the ones shot by Fotofactory a few pages down, I would most definitely pay Fotofactory to shoot my wedding. I suspect I would get fewer images, but they would be much more stylish. Assuming your goal was to publicise your business, it makes no sense to do it in this forum, which is visited by a handful of retro-technology enthusiasts spread thinly across the globe. I suspect that in the Nikon forum your post would be buried within minutes.
Still, your shots caused me to ponder the nature of wedding photography. On the one hand it has feet in two different stools. Leftwards it is photojournalism, because the clients want a record of the time; clockwise it is art, because the clients don't want flies and mucous and boils and warts and horse dung, they want something that captures the moment and looks good. I suspect that news photography is moving in the direction of wedding photography, with layers of style that replicate a moviegoer's idea of reality. I'm thinking of all those photos from the Iraq / Afghanistan war that have been deliberately shot and processed so as to look like Saving Private Ryan. That doesn't happen accidentally. People are unnerved by photographs of the real world. Natural photographs of the real world make the audience feel small.
I have no doubt that you captured every aspect of the day, with hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, albeit that you didn't really capture the moment as it was, you selected poses and shots etc. The photographs mean something to the people in the photographs, but they mean nothing to me because I have no emotional connection with the people. They are just people. People on the other side of the world that I will never meet. Young-looking uninteresting-looking normal everyday people of a kind I can look at in real life. I don't want to look at everyday people, I have seen enough everyday people to make me sick. I am sick of everyday people, I am sick of their conservatism and lack of ambition.
I also have no emotional connection with Fotofactory's pictures - none of the pictures in this thread have any emotion in them, a wedding is not the place for emotion - but they have style. The style substitutes for the lack of emotion. Your photographs are a truthful record of people I have never met and don't care about, and so I feel nothing.
It raises a wider point as to what wedding photography is far. For the clients, is it a means to remember the past, or a means to show off the expense of their wedding to other people? For the photographer it is presumably a means to shot off and win more clients and thus money - no-one would photograph the marriage of strangers for fun - in which case Fotofactory's pictures do a better job, because they have the aforementioned style. Yours are probably more truthful but at the same time they aren't really truthful, because there are no warts or boils etc. There's no truth or emotion or style and I don't care about the people.
Out of that reply by far the best epigram is "a wedding is not the place for emotion". Going by Google's search results I was the first person to say that.
