Real or fake

Real Weddings vs Fake Weddings

If you’re browsing a lot of online blogs and photography websites while planning your wedding, you will probably stumble upon weddings that look so amazing they simply couldn’t be real — the details look over-the-top with mason jars and candles hanging from trees, the cake looks so pristine you wouldn’t want to cut it, and even the bride and groom look like models. You’re probably right: the bride and groom are models, and that isn’t a real wedding! It’s something called an “Inspiration Shoot”, and it’s disheartening to see so many wedding blogs and photographers advertising these staged photos as if they were taken at a real wedding.

Inspiration Shoots, also known as “styled shoots”, are a popular way for wedding vendors to enhance their portfolios by staging a fake wedding. Photographers participate to photograph a model bride and groom with amazing wedding details, and other vendors participate so they can use the photos to show off their own work as well. The most photogenic location is chosen, beautiful models are hired, florists and cake designers slave to produce their best work…every element is hand-picked and set perfectly in place. But while these fake weddings may inspire you, they also give a false impression of what vendors and photographers can produce on a wedding day where it is unlikely to find these ideal conditions.

While an inspiration shoot can demonstrate a photographer’s ability and talent to capture a scene, the photographer did not have to deal with the normal pressures found on a wedding day–like hectic time constraints, the less-than-ideal lighting situations, or Aunt Sally interrupting you to photograph her 5 sisters and 12 cousins from Texas that she never gets to see. A photographer can take an entire day to capture beautiful photos of an inspiration shoot, but can that same photographer handle the pressures of a real wedding?