Wedding Photography Trends Come and Go. Your Memories Shouldn’t.
Wedding photography has changed enormously since I started photographing weddings 18 years ago. Cameras have changed, editing has changed, social media has completely changed the way people see wedding photographs and, every few years, another style seems to become the thing everybody suddenly wants. Some of those changes have been brilliant and I've happily adopted them myself, while others have come and gone almost as quickly as they appeared.
I've never really had a problem with trends. Weddings should be personal, photography should evolve and it would be pretty boring if every wedding photograph still looked exactly as it did when I first started. What I do think is worth remembering, though, is that your wedding photographs have a much longer life than most wedding trends. Something that looks incredibly fashionable on Instagram today still needs to mean something when you're looking at it in ten, twenty or forty years' time.
And that's where, for me, the people in the photographs will always win.
I've watched wedding photography change
When you've been photographing weddings for as long as I have, you inevitably watch styles come around, disappear and occasionally come back again wearing slightly different clothes. We've had heavily tilted photographs, selective colour, enormous vignettes, vintage effects, washed-out colours, very dark and moody editing, incredibly bright and airy editing and plenty of other looks along the way. At one point it seemed almost compulsory to photograph the wedding rings balanced on absolutely anything that would stay still long enough.
Some of those styles can look fantastic and there are photographers who have built genuinely beautiful work around them. This isn't me saying there's one correct way to photograph or edit a wedding, because there isn't. Couples should absolutely choose a photographer whose work they love, and photographers should be able to develop a recognisable style of their own.
The danger comes when the trend becomes more important than the photograph.
If I'm looking at a photograph of somebody laughing with their dad on their wedding morning, I want the first thing they notice years later to be their dad laughing, not an editing effect that immediately tells them which decade the photograph came from.
Your wedding photographs have to outlive Instagram
Social media has probably had the biggest influence on wedding photography during my career. We see thousands of photographs now in a way couples simply didn't when I started, and there's always something new competing for attention. A particular pose, editing style or photograph becomes popular, gets copied hundreds of times and before long it's appearing everywhere.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with taking inspiration from those photographs. If you've seen something you genuinely love, show me. I've had couples send me ideas before and I'm not precious about it. But there's a difference between taking inspiration from something and spending your wedding day trying to recreate somebody else's Pinterest board.
Your wedding is happening once. The photograph you saw online has already happened to somebody else.
I'd much rather use the location, light, weather and people I've actually got in front of me and create something from your day. That doesn't mean ignoring ideas or refusing to try something because somebody else has done it before; virtually everything in photography has been done before in some form. It simply means I'm not going to miss what's genuinely happening around me because I'm too busy trying to manufacture a photograph that happens to be fashionable this year.
The photographs that become important aren't always the obvious ones
This is something I've become more aware of the longer I've photographed weddings. On the wedding day itself, it's completely understandable that couples are excited about the big photographs. The photograph outside the church, the two of you in front of the venue, the sunset photograph or that beautiful portrait where everything just came together perfectly. I love creating those photographs too, and some of them absolutely deserve to end up framed on a wall.
But a wedding gallery has another job.
Mixed amongst those bigger photographs might be your mam helping you with your dress, your dad seeing you ready for the first time, your grandparents sitting together during the ceremony, your best friend absolutely losing it during a speech or a child doing something completely ridiculous while all the adults are looking the other way. At the time, those photographs might not feel as spectacular as the one of you standing underneath an enormous sunset.
Give them twenty years.
People change. Families change. Children grow up and, sadly, people who were there on the wedding day won't always be there forever. Suddenly a photograph doesn't matter because of how beautifully it was posed or because the editing was fashionable. It matters because of who is in it.
That's one of the reasons documentary wedding photography has become such an important part of the way I work. I'm still going to take the group photographs and I'm still going to take you away for some lovely photographs together, but while the rest of the wedding is happening I'm constantly watching the people around you as well.
Timeless doesn't have to mean boring
The word timeless gets thrown around wedding photography almost as much as natural, and I sometimes think people interpret it as meaning safe, traditional or slightly dull. That's not what I mean by it at all.
I still want photographs with impact. If we've got amazing light, I'm using it. If the sky suddenly does something ridiculous at golden hour, I'll probably be dragging you outside for five minutes. 😂 If there's an interesting reflection, dramatic architecture or something happening with the weather that gives me the opportunity to create a photograph that's a little different, I'm absolutely going to make the most of it.
The difference is that I don't want the technique to become more important than the people.
Editing is the same. Every photograph I deliver is edited and I want the finished gallery to have a consistent look and feel, but I don't want to impose so much of an effect onto an image that it stops looking like the day I photographed. If your bridesmaids wore green dresses, I'd quite like them still to be green when you look at the photographs in ten years. 😂
Trends can be fun — just don't let them run your wedding
There will always be new wedding photography ideas, and some of them are genuinely great fun. Champagne sprays, blurry dance-floor photographs, direct-flash images, unusual compositions and whatever else appears next will all have their moment. Some will stick around and become part of wedding photography; others we'll probably look back at in a decade and wonder what the hell we were all doing.
That's fine. Photographs don't all have to be serious historical documents and your wedding gallery should have personality. If there's something fun you want to try and we have the opportunity, let's do it. I just wouldn't want an entire wedding gallery built around whatever happens to be fashionable at that particular moment.
For me, the strongest galleries have a mixture. There are photographs that make you stop because they're beautiful, photographs that make you laugh because you'd forgotten something happened and photographs that might seem fairly ordinary to everybody else but mean absolutely everything to you.
Eighteen years later, I'm still photographing people
The equipment I use today is very different from what I carried to my first weddings. The way I edit has evolved, the industry has changed and I've changed as a photographer too. I'd be slightly worried if I was still doing everything exactly as I did 18 years ago.
But the thing I'm actually photographing hasn't changed very much at all.
It's still people.
People getting nervous before the ceremony, parents trying not to cry, friends taking the piss out of each other, children getting bored during speeches, grandparents watching everything quietly from the side and two people in the middle of it all having one of the biggest days of their lives. None of those things need a trend to make them worth photographing.
That's why I've never wanted couples to spend their wedding day performing for my cameras. I'll step in when you need me, organise the photographs that need organising and make the most of great light and locations when they're there. For the rest of it, I'd much rather let your wedding happen and pay attention.
Because when you look back at your wedding photographs years from now, I don't particularly want you thinking about what was fashionable in wedding photography in 2026. I want you remembering the people who were there, what they were like, what happened and how it all felt.
Wedding photography trends will come and go. Your memories deserve to last a little longer.
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