It’s a day that’s remembered for a lifetime, and frozen in snapshots. Many youngsters from various fields who have a way with the camera are now taking up wedding photography to follow their passion and earn quick bucks.
Most start with a friend or relative’s wedding to hone their skills and build their portfolio. And then they graduate to taking up professional assignments, earning a fair amount that starts from Rs 15,000 for a day’s shoot.
Delhi-based, self-taught photographer and stylist Cimmron Singh started looking at life from behind the lens in 2007 when she was gifted her first digital camera by her friends. She got her first wedding assignment after she posted some candid shots from her sister’s wedding on Facebook. With no formal background in photography, she borrowed an SLR camera and jumped into the profession. “Mine is a candid and documentary style, and freezing just the right moment is an essential element. It’s the in thing to get an exclusive wedding photographer to lend magic to their fairytale wedding. Many dislike intimidating shaadi shutterbugs with their point and shoot attitude, and ‘a posey filmi photo’ is so passé. Couples are now looking for a more personalised way of capturing their big day,” she adds.
For some, it’s a break from their boring tedious job. Himanshu Shivnani, a software engineer and a passionate landscape photographer, tried his hand at wedding photography after he received great appreciation for his snapshots of his cousin’s wedding. “Now I only take up a few weddings on request, but I would like to continue it as a serious profession.”
Vijay Tonk, an art director with an advertising firm, took up wedding photography as a profession last year. Now, he covers more than 10 weddings a month and is earning nothing less than `25,000 to `1 lakh per wedding. “Although I was working with an advertising firm, photography remained my passion. In Delhi, the wedding business is huge and people today don’t mind splurging extra on wedding photographs,” he says.
Pre-wedding photography is also turning out to be a lucrative career option. Ankit Chawla and Neha Chawla do pre-wedding photography with interesting filmi and quirky themes. Shares Ankit, “We are basically consultants, stylists and photographers. We send questionnaires and set the theme as per the requirements, get props and arrange the shoot. Recently, a couple’s favourite movie was Jab We Met, we did the shoot at a railway station.”
A 26-year-old documentary photographer, Chavvi Goyal has now established herself as a pre-wedding photographer. “I’m more into pre-wedding shoots, which is all about capturing candid moments of a couple a week before the wedding in a casual ambience like that in a café or a park. Though it’s a strenuous job and post-production and re-touching pictures takes a lot of time, it’s fun,” she says.
Tarun Chawla, a web developer and a wedding photographer, states, “For perfect wedding pictures, a photographer needs to develop a bond with the couple and family to bring out the real emotions in the pictures.”