Wedding Storyteller, Volume 1

Book excerpt: In Wedding Storyteller, Volume 1: Elevating the Approach to Photographing Wedding Stories, photographer and educator Roberto Valenzuela delivers what so many of his readers have been asking for: a book specifically dedicated to helping photographers improve their wedding photography. A wedding photographer himself, Roberto built his business from the ground up based on high-quality imagery that tells a compelling and beautiful story of his clients’ most important day.

This is not a standard wedding photography book. In Wedding Storyteller, you will not find a collection of “looks,” which neither inspire nor teach you anything. You will also not find a wedding shot list—at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, this first volume of the three-part Wedding Storyteller series goes beyond the superficial and dives deeply into the truly important topics, themes, and subject matter you need to learn about in order to drastically elevate your wedding photography. Most importantly, Roberto stresses the crucial role that storytelling plays in creating compelling, meaningful, and unique photographs for your clients.

In this book, Roberto has created a unique approach that anyone can learn to implement. Roberto’s “wedding storyteller skill components” system is divided into four sections:

• Foundation Components: Location Techniques. Learn how to conquer the locations you encounter as a wedding photographer. Roberto teaches you how to work with light, context, clutter, walls, depth, and other compositional elements such as frames and reflections.

• Foundation Components: People Techniques. Weddings are often high-energy, high-stress environments; your attitude and behavior have a huge impact on your ability to succeed as a photographer. Roberto discusses the crucial people skills you need to know and also teaches his unique approach to “situational posing” and group posing.

• Storyteller Approach Components. Roberto discusses the five approaches he uses to build a “wedding story” for his clients. These five approaches are: photojournalism, interactive photojournalism, stylized aware posing, stylized unaware posing, and story development.

• Expert Components. The final section builds and expands on everything covered in the previous components, as Roberto addresses such topics as Emotionally Valuable People (EVP), lens choices, helper light, posing patterns (and when to break them), capturing “peak action,” achieving a unique perspective, and creating multi-layered stories within a single photograph.

At a wedding, each photograph has the opportunity to convey a special moment and contribute to the rich, visual story of your clients’ most important day. As the photographer, you are both the director and the documentarian of that story. With Wedding Storyteller, Volume 1, by your side, you finally have a book that teaches you the skills you need to learn in order to create amazing images and craft masterful stories filled with beauty, emotion, and meaning.