Weddingbee boards

Bees! Let's talk about Pinterest for a minute.

This year I have witnessed the absolute takeover of Pinterest for wedding planning. It's a great resource - I use it myself for planning all kinds of things. But there's a trend happening now that I hope we can discuss and curb, and that trend is this: sending your photographer a powerpoint presentation or folder of endless photos/poses you've grabbed from Pinterest to replicate on your wedding day.

At more than a handful of my weddings this year I have spent literally all of the time we had for portraits fielding requests from brides/bridesmaids on this or that pose they saw on Pinterest. Literally one request after another - I'm embarrassed to say how many times I've taken the "groom holding out his hand with the ring on it while groomsmen fawn over it in a 'girly' way" shot this year. Before pinterest what did couples do? They trusted their photographers to use the existing surroundings, circumstances, and personalities to create new images, unique to the time and place and lighting conditions around you on your wedding day. Now we're all struggling to re-enact the same 10 most re-pinned wedding party and couples shots and it eats away time your photographer could be using to create new images for you. What do you get as a result? The same wedding photos that everyone around you has, and no one thinks "ohhh that's super creative and cool!" they think "ohh yeah I saw that on Pinterest/6 of my friends did that at their weddings too". The wedding day is not like a portrait session where we generally have all the time in the world to incorporate poses you saw and things the photographer would like to do based on your personalities and chemistry. We might only have 15 minutes to get through photos and it takes an immense amount of time to explain and organize a wedding party into specific replicated poses. Ask yourself if you really want the same photos every other bride getting married that season is going to have.

Please understand that if you overload your photographers with Pinterest poses you may be  eliminating the chance to have images that are uniquely you and your wedding party. Say you pinned a photo of all the groomsmen jumping off a brick wall in epic fashion (maybe at that particular wedding all the groomsmen were aerialists and it made sense in the context of that wedding) but two of your groomsmen are on the portly side and drop straight to the ground making that photo unsuccessful and awkward. Maybe you pinned that photo of the bridesmaids mooning the camera all giggly and cute but one of your bridesmaids is secretly uncomfortable with it and they turn red and the discomfort shows on their face making that photo unsuccessful. I have couples asking me to replicate images that have epic sun flare but it ends up being cloudy on their wedding day and none of their images look like what they've been pinning for months. It just sets you up for disappointment.

I'm encouraging all of my 2013 couples ahead of time this year to limit their Pinterest pose requests to around three photos they like the idea of and ask them to trust me enough to put my own spin on it based on the conditions and surroundings on their wedding day and let them know that if we are running really tight on time I will prioritize producing unique images for them. I love Pinterest like no one's business but it's potential for recycling creativity instead of inspiring actual creativity (in every way, from home decor to fashion, not just wedding photography) has definitely started to rear its ugly head this year. Consider the images you may be giving up when you ask your photographer to spend so many of those precious wedding day minutes trying to recreate instead of create.

Thanks for your advise. The funny thing is, my photagrapher asked me for some ideas of specific shots we want for our engagement session but once we arrived to the park that where we took our pictures I didn't really care which poses we did as long as I didn't look fat!! haha well he really couldn't perform miracles but I am happy with the various poses he chose to take for our engagement session

I like some of the ideas on pinetrest but know that everything doesn't work right for everyone. 

I think it is a good idea to ask if your photographer wants an idea of they types of photos you like to get the creative juices going even if they aren't exactly pinetrest worthy

I know a lot of Bees mention their photographers are asking them to send them tons of ideas for photos. This would be a red flag for me. Someone who wants to create beautiful, unique imagery for you isn't going to want to be handed a list of photos to reenact if they have a creative bone in their body. It is not your job to curate a detailed list of poses and if your photographer is asking you to do that you have to wonder why. Like I said in my original post, I am more than happy to look at brides' Pinterest boards and see what kind of photos they gravitate toward and put my own spin on that but I'll be honest with you - if you're dictating shot after shot you are 9 times out of 10 exhausting your photographer. There's a certain level of trust you need to have in your photographer. Communicate some must-haves of course, but be realistic about it and understand what you may be sacrificing in doing so.

@Mrs. Mink: Instead of those regular shot lists that The Knot tells you are must-haves (like "bride with groom" and "bride getting dressed" - duhhh what are we doing if we're NOT taking those photos?) I ask couples to let me know about specific things about their wedding day that hold significance for them that I might not know about unless they told me. Like let me know if you have your grandmother's ring tied in the toule of your dress or that the charms hanging off your bouquet were your mother's, things like that. But this post isn't really about those kinds of shot lists (that has been discussed a million times here). I'm specifically talking about sending your photographer links ahead of time to all of these specific, overdone shots you saw on Pinterest and putting in his or her head that they need to recreate these images for you instead of making anything new and creative based on the reality of your wedding day. Like a PP mentioned, these images are going to date your wedding photos in the same way those puffy 80s bridesmaids dresses and hair dated your parents photos.

I'm certainly not saying there isn't a happy medium. I just wanted to explain that in the chaos of trying to finish portraits in 15 minutes before you're scheduled to be introduced, hearing "ohhh and then there was this other shot I saw on Pinterest" 9 times in those 15 minutes is not a happy medium and as you can imagine it's incredibly taxing when we're asked to recreate the work of another photographer instead of doing what we (thought) we were hired to do - capture images that tell the story of your day, not someone else's.

Thank you for this reminder! I picked my photographer because I loved his work. I'll take a step back and remember that when engagement photo time comes! Does it bother photographers if I still have a list of must haves? Like a picture of me with all my sisters or a picture of my brothers and the groom?

@BooRadley:  Yes - SO much extra stress! I hate when I hear from brides that they love their photos but just hate they missed X Y and Z Pinterest shots and all I can think is "if Pinterest didn't exist you would be totally happy with what we were able to do with the time and circumstances we had". There's no limit to what you can pin but there is a limit to what we can get done and I think it's one of the overarching problems with Pinterest. There are SO MANY ideas that we get paralyzed by indecision and find ourselves trying to do all of it and sacrificing a lot of contentment as a result. I urge couples to think critically about the kind of shots that are meaningful and feasible for them, not the masses. 

@KCKnd2:  Hahaha thanks for that dissection of my example? I am overweight myself so be careful what you categorize as weight related stereotypes. I didn't say overweight people fall faster than others, I said they hit the ground before everyone else. Whats actually happening is the portly gentlemen  are not able to jump as high and therefore land before everyone else. I didn't think I needed to go into such detail about the physics of that. I physically cannot jump as high as my friend who weighs 75 lbs less than me. Ask any photographer for a million examples of this and they can show them to you. The point I was making was that I'm seeing a lot of requests for Pinterest shots that don't take into consideration the make-up of that couples actual wedding party. Don't ask your girls to moon the camera if you know this would be embarrassing for one or two of them. Its the same thing as me understanding that certain shots I might like with my fiancé aren't going to work based on the fact that my boobs are too big for us to cuddle comfortably in a grass field. I love those shots but that's just not going to happen for me and asking my photographer to try to make that work is setting myself up for disappointment.

@Spade504:  Not at all! Family groupings are a totally different story. I give my couples a list of the basics I shoot - parents and couple, parents siblings and couple, grandparents and couple, etc and then ask them to jot down additional groups. I'm mainly referring to things like you see a photo on Pinterest of a couple writing in the air with sparklers and it's pitch black around them  making that image possible but you're getting married in the middle of downtown with ambient light coming from every direction from street lights and buildings and cars which would make that image incredibly time consuming and probably impossible to recreate. 

this is great! Thanks for keeping us 2013 brides in check! I don't have a Pinterest account anyway. I can't be bothered with all of that, but when we did our engagement shoot, I wanted our photographer to be creative and looked through her book to see poses I liked that she did and used that as inspiration. She had a photojournalist style and it worked out well for us. We loved how they came out and so did everyone else! I plan to do the same thing with my wedding photographer. She's a professional and I trust her instincts with us as individuals. I don't want to be carbon copy.

@annabelle_lee:  I'm not trying to talk anyone out of shots. Like I said, I took the groomsmen fawning over the grooms ring shot 12 times this year without a word. What I'm trying to explain is that I'm seeing a lot of couples UNHAPPY because of Pinterest. They see an image and when it doesn't come out like what they pinned they are let down. My point is that every wedding IS unique in terms of personalities, weather, scenery, lighting, and schedule. Like starfish mentioned above, unfortunately MUCH of what brides are seeing on blogs are styled shoots where photographers and hair/make up artists and planners and florists all come together for a planned shoot with models and the ability to reschedule when it turns out to be a cloudy day. They get to pick their backgrounds and take hours to perfect and tweak shots that then get pinned all over the place and brides don't know that those images can't be achieved when we have 10 minutes to run through photos because the ceremony started late. 

Communication with your photographer is key, but even that doesn't always help avoid this issue. At a recent wedding I had gone through all of this with my bride, we had a great plan laid out to get a mixture of Pinterest inspired and original shots, but the day of when photo time rolled around her 11 bridesmaids bombarded me with shot request after shot request. we ultimately ended up losing about 15 minutes of time that was originally allocated for her and her husband because I was trying to process and execute 15 different shots from Pinterest. So all of my planning with her didn't help us avoid the chorus of requests from family and friends. I'm just putting this out there as something for bees to think about as they plan. If they happen to read this and then on their wedding day see some of this coming true (like the constant requests from moms or bridesmaids) they may remember this post and shut that down before it gets out of control. 

I think this might fall on deaf ears. Weddingbee is a very DIY site and a lot of brides really want 100% control over their wedding day and this includes the shots that photographers take. Not all pinterest brides and photographers are a great fit for each other.

My photographer wasn't the most creative, so he asked for shot ideas and I gave them to him. He took amazing shots, but didn't give good direction, so I'm SO glad I did this. I didn't want to not be 100% happy with my wedding photographs.

I don't understand why photographers resist direction? I met with many photographers to get estimates and they explained that they didn't want any direction, shot lists, etc and that they didn't want me directing photographs. If my florist had said that to me or my caterer or my wedding planner, I wouldn't have been okay with it and I would have ended up with chicken when I wanted fish. Obviously I went to a competent caterer and florist, but I had opinions on what I wanted the finished product to be.

@BuffaloDots:  Like I said, there's a happy medium to be had. I can only speak from my experience going to a lot more weddings (over 150 now) than most brides will ever attend. I can only speak from my observations and the patterns I see emerging with brides who get wrapped up in Pinterest vs those who don't when it comes to photography. Pinterest is not reality - temper your expectations and you wont end up disappointed because your images dont look like what youve been staring at for a year. Take the advice or leave it. :)

For me personally, I come from a photojournalism background so I want to work with couples who trust my instinct to capture authentic moments rather than set up completely unnatural shots and deliver them in all the glory that the fashion photographer who originally took the image did. If glorious Pinterest shots are all you want just make sure you find a photographer who is all about that. Most of us kind of hate it, mostly because we can so vividly remember the time before Pinterest when couples trusted us more. ;)

@atlbride2013:  Right! Hilarious when it's one or two totally weird poses your kidsmake fun of when they look at the photos, but kind of sad if ALL the portrait time was that sort of stuff, you know? That's what I'm trying to help brides avoid by limiting these shots in favor of things that will be a little more authentic and timeless.