12 Famous Paintings All Wedding Photographers Should Know
What does your Wedding Photographer look for on your wedding day? And how do we decide what photos to take? Let’s take a look behind the though processes of a Wedding Photographer!
We anticipate 3 things when we shoot your wedding day. These are:
- Moments: Emotion and Motion
- Composition: Elements and Principles
- Lighting: Colour and Contrast
These priorities are always in that order.
For example, we can capture a great moment and you won’t be at all concerned with composition and lighting. You’re just thrilled we captured your dad shedding the only tear in the 30 years you’ve known him! Amazing!
But if we have incredible composition and lighting for a non-moment, then you don’t care that we took a photo of a place setting in an empty reception room. Yawn boring…
So you should know that Moment, Composition and Lighting are always in the back of our minds when we shoot your portraits and document the scene your special day.
Thing is, portraits and scenes have been around for a very long time — long before photography was even invented. And they’re much more thoughtful in their composition in lighting, considering they take much longer to create.
These are the 12 paintings all Wedding Photographers should know:
12. Arnolfini Portrait — Jan van Eyck | 1434
Arnolfini Portrait — Jan van Eyck | 1434 is one the most accomplished paintings ever made.
Wedding photographers: it is a technical and aesthetic marvel. Every aspect is amazing: the double portrait, story, composition, attention to detail and even lighting:
11. Las Meninas — Diego Velázquez | 1656
Las Meninas — Diego Velázquez | 1656 is perhaps the greatest painting ever created. I’m not alone in this opinion.
Wedding Photographers: the depth, the illusions, the framing, the self portrait, the perspective, and even the sheer scope and SIZE:
10. Nighthawks — Edward Hopper | 1942
Nighthawks — Edward Hopper | 1942 is a composition masterwork.
For Wedding Photographers who know how to use leading lines and negative space to emote and tell a story:
9. The Night Watch — Rembrandt | 1642
The Night Watch — Rembrandt | 1642 is incredible, and is a study in group image composition and directing attention:
8. The Great Wave off Kanagawa — Hokusai | 1833
Check out that sense of scale! The use of the new-for-it’s-time colour, of directing the eye around the image! Is it a tsunami or a rogue wave?
7. Luncheon of the Boating Party — Pierre Auguste Renoir | 1881
Snapping a moment in time, freezing the expressions and emotions and relationships and perspectives — it’s how you tell a story without a story:
6. Cafe Terrace at Night — Vincent Van Gogh | 1888
You never need razor sharp detail to tell a story. Your wedding photographer chasing megapixels is insane. It’s colour, and light, dynamism and perspective.
5. Rain’s Rustle — Leonid Afremov
Leonid Afremov is the only modern artist on this list, due to his masterful use of colour, texture and vitality. I’d rather have one of these paintings as my wedding photos than any of the boring-ass wedding photos out there.
4. The Laughing Cavalier — Frans Hals | 1624
This one is for the geeks: it is technically one of the greatest paintings ever created. It is boring, yes, but it’s an important lesson in lighting, line and shape:
3. Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer | 1665
This is how you do a portrait of the female form. Bring up her chin, get the catch light in her eyes, have her look into shadow. Is it a moment captured, or a pose with finesse? Pro photographers know it’s a sample of BOTH. And I mean geez, she looks she has LIPGLOSS on! Incredible:
2. Lady Agnew of Lochnaw — John Singer Sargent | 1892
You think you’ve seen it all, and then you see a portrait like this and you’re blown away. You can see where mistakes were made — check out her sash, and the texture of the chair. This was painted long before selfies were a thing, and Sargent just nailed the attitude, and the temperament:
The Kiss — Gustav Klimt | 1908
Your wedding photographs don’t come even CLOSE to this painting of 2 lovers in embrace. Technical skill in using gold aside, see how their heads are so high up in the frame? Not exactly rule of thirds is it? Looks like Japanese prints! It breaks rules because rules are meant to be broken if you understand WHY:
More Famous Paintings You Should Know
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette — Pierre Auguste Renoir | 1876
Mona Lisa — Leonardo Da Vinci |1517
The Birth of Venus — Sandro Botticelli | 1486
Starry Night — Vincent Van Gogh | 1889
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — Georges Seurat | 1886
Composition with Red Blue and Yellow — Piet Mondrian |1930
Guernica — Pablo Picasso | 1937
Impression, Sunrise — Claude Monet | 1872
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog — Caspar David Friedrich | 1819
The Scream — Edward Munch | 1893
Composition VIII — Wassily Kandinsky | 1923
The Lady of Shalott — John William Waterhouse | 1888
Water Lilies — Claude Monet | 1840–1926
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte — Georges-Pierre Seurat | 1886
Persistence of Memory — Salvador Dali | 1931
The Son of Man — Rene Magritte | 1964
The Sleeping Gypsy — Henri Rosseau | 1897
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird — Frida Kahlo | 1940
No 5, 1948 — Jackson Pollock | 1948
The Calling of Saint Matthew — Caravaggio | 1600
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Pablo Picasso | 1907
Primavera — Sandro Boticelli | 1480
The Ninth Wave — Ivan Aivasovsky | 1850
Paris Street in Rainy Day — Gustave Caillebotte | 1877
Flaming June — Frederic Leighton | 1895
Three Musicians — Pablo Picasso | 1921
The Swing — Eugene Delacroix | 1830
The Grand Odalisque — Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres| 1814
Le Déjeuner Sur l’herbe — Edouard Manet | 1863
