Shooting in Indian weddings are always a challenge. There are so many factors that one needs to take care of when doing so. From the light to the unwanted subjects to the excessive jewelery to the everyone wanting to be shot.

The major challenge arises from the light. Weddings in the North Indian style are usually held in the night. There is always the case of either the location being under-lit or over-lit. Like in one of the wedding, the location was in a temple and the temple premises did not have proper lights. In such cases flash is good but only to a certain extent. The problem with flash is that the foreground gets well lit and foreground becomes dark. And in the other occasion where there is excess lights there is always the fear of over exposing the details. Like in a recent shot I did, a friend commented that “you have to work on the lighting, since the brides have paint (makeup) on their faces.”

There are reasons behind this. In the weddings that I have been shooting, the light has been through a harsh yellow light, that has a very high Kelvin temperature. As a result of this, the subject has really harsh shadows behind it. A flash on top of this adds a lot of light. So one has to be careful. Ideally the way out of this is to have a diffuser that would soften the light. An umbrella would solve that. But do you really think it is possible to set that up in the middle of the wedding.

Apart from this, there is always something interesting happening in some part of the wedding. So one has to prioritize which part of the wedding is the most important and would help in re-telling the story of the entire wedding through pictures. And with multiple venues and subjects, comes more and more challenges.

The riot of colors that any Indian wedding throws at the viewer is something that can be a challenge to the photographer. The excess of reds and yellows in the frames can get really stressful to the eyes. So the photographer has to strike a balance in the colors.

Above all one has to enjoy the wedding to be able to take good pictures. This means one has to get comfortable with not only the subjects (the main couple) but also the tons of relatives that make it to weddings! It is often difficult to identify the bride’s or the groom’s side, especially if you do not know the people around you. The sooner you are able to feel comfortable, the easier it is.

Lastly, one has to always keep smiling! After all you cannot expect the subjects to smile, if you yourself are not smiling!