Photographers + Pinterest = A Love-Hate Relationship

I must preface this entire article by letting you all know that I — as any other female with an iPhone — love Pinterest. However, as a photographer, I have a much different feeling about Pinterest.

More often than not, my brides will send me a link to their wedding boards, which I am totally excited about!  I love being able to see my bride’s dreams for their wedding day, and even more importantly, I love being able to see the style of posing that the bride is drawn to.  It is so important for me to really get to know my couples before their wedding day. It allows me to capture more of their personality, and that work becomes effortless because we laugh the day away!

… however …

I must admit that I hate when a bride is insistent on replicating an exact pose from their Pinterest wedding board. There are so many reasons why brides should not be concerned about duplicating what they’ve seen on Pinterest.  The first and foremost is that picture you’re looking at, is not YOUR wedding. It is someone else’s — your wedding should be uniquely YOURS.

When a bride absolutely wants to recreate something from Pinterest, we usually end up having a lengthy discussion about the technical aspects of the picture such as the bride and groom’s style, their setting, the height difference between the bride and groom, and most importantly of all, the lighting.  I’d bet a whole lot of money that it is not solely the pose that my brides are interested in — it’s the pose combined with the picturesque background, the style of the bride and groom, and that ooey gooey golden hour lighting.  Inevitably that conversation ends with the bride understanding that they are not that exact bride, with that exact groom, at that exact location during that exact time with the exact same lighting.

So let’s focus on using Pinterest as inspiration for your wedding day instead of recreating someone else’s wedding day.  I promise that your Pinspiration, attention to detail, and showing off your love for your husband-to-be will lead to “Pinterest Pictures” that will leave other brides pinning YOUR wedding!

And now for the real reason I wrote this blog…

When I decided to post this to my blog, it was because of everything mentioned above, but also because I was cooking — or better said, failing to cook — a Pinterest recipe.  So get ready to laugh at my most recent Pinterest fail which led me to the perfect analogy for my brides.

From now on, when a bride insists on replicating something EXACTLY as it was on Pinterest, I will relate it to replicating recipes — I did step by step what Pinterest said to do but it’s not the same because we are not in that specific location with that specific lighting…aka not that specific chef in that specific kitchen. See example #1 below…