Wedding Photojournalist Association

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FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER:
SUSAN STRIPLING

When Susan Stripling was asked to photograph her first wedding, her experience was limited to chasing her new baby around with a cheap point-and-shoot camera her mom won for signing up with America Online. The engaged couple, who were colleagues of her husband, had seen some of her snapshots, and they were impressed with her eye. “They didn’t have a lot of money,” says Stripling. “They knew I wasn’t a professional, and they just wanted someone who was fairly confident with a camera.”

Her debut aspirations were not the most ambitious: “I didn’t want to do anything fancy. I just wanted to learn how not to suck,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Just don’t ruin it.’” The sting of seeing her own wedding album for the first time—a tearful event several years before—had still not worn off. “It was ugly. It was traditional. It was really cheesy. And on my way to the wedding, I thought ‘I don’t want to do anything like that.’”

There was that photograph of her sitting on a bench with her arm over the back, locking arms with her husband, who was standing behind the bench gazing down at her. “We’re not like that. We’re not gushy, romantic types. We’re more funny and sarcastic. But the photographer kept making us do these silly things that we would never do in real life.” Ironically, those tacky wedding photographs inspired her to follow a career of high achievement in wedding photojournalism. Stripling, who went to college for theater, but later couldn’t quite decide what to pursue professionally, had found her calling by mere chance, word-of-mouth and a fierce devotion to both her craft and her clients. When the wedding photos came back from her first job, she was surprised by how good they were, and a thriving business was born.

In less than five years, Stripling has photographed more than 150 weddings and has been recognized multiple times by the WPJA for her work in humor, action and artistic categories. She has also graduated to a Canon 5D—to her an impressive accomplishment, considering she shot her first few weddings with a “Canon Rebel set permanently to priority aperture.” A self-taught wedding photojournalist, Stripling describes herself as an incredibly stubborn learner—a characteristic she really likes and really hates. Admittedly, she could have become technically proficient much faster through some training, but she wanted to figure it out for herself. The upside: she knows her craft intimately, and it shows.

She spent countless hours checking out library books, pouring over the camera’s manual, reading articles online, posting questions and reading answers on message boards — all while experimenting with every possible variable. If she saw a photo she liked — perhaps one with a crisp subject in the foreground and a soft background—she would figure out how to do just that. “I needed to teach myself how to have the exact control over the kind of image I wanted to make.” She treated it like a hobby, taking hundreds of photos with various lighting conditions, speeds and film until she could produce very specific results.

You might say it was that same sense of experimental tenacity that helped shape her creative vision. Initially, she was a rigid pupil to the school of straight-up wedding photojournalism. Then, she took a turn towards the funky, favoring the fashion side of wedding photography. “Eventually, I realized that neither one of those were really my style,” says Stripling, who ended up somewhere in the middle. I’m still very journalistic, but I always try to make things look pretty.”

Mission accomplished. Whether she’s capturing a moment of joy or an interesting—almost cheeky—perspective her photographs share common ground: they are always beautiful—both aesthetically and emotionally. She makes everything seem genuine, thanks to her natural sense of anticipation. Not that she doesn’t work at it though.

Part knack for reading people and part patience, she has become proficient in the right place at the right time. “I’ll sit there, and watch and listen to them, so I’m really tuned in. Instead of shooting hundreds and hoping for a good one, I’ll shoot two or three and get the one.”

And since Stripling’s clients are mostly out-of-town brides and grooms traveling to Florida for destination weddings, she generally doesn’t meet them before the big day. It’s very important for her to build rapport with them very quickly at their wedding—but genuinely, not by using a fake persona to loosen people up. The way she sees it: the couples don’t know her, so when she walks into the room where they’re getting ready, she’s a complete stranger. If she doesn’t spend some quality time connecting with them, then she’s just a person with a camera who will be following them around all day. When she relates to them on a personal level, they’re free to be themselves in front of her—and the images are so much better.

It’s normal for couples to feel like they’re on stage all day—a fact that makes taking natural photographs all the more trying. But Stripling considers it her job to recognize when the bride and groom are themselves, not two people acting out the roles and rituals of their wedding day. She knows the signs like she knows her camera: “When their eyes get soft. When they’re not being observant, looking at all those people looking at them. They’re really focused on what’s going on, and they’re letting themselves be in the moment,” she says. Every bride is different though. “Sometimes it’s when she relaxes her shoulders, or when she’s not smiling that hard smile, but it’s smaller, and it turns down at the sides.”

As a wedding photojournalist, she feels it’s her duty to pay attention to this kind of minutia. “There are hundreds and hundreds of moments to make great weddings during the day, but none of them can be recreated,” she says. A reminder of the enormous responsibility she carries, one of the worst photos from her own wedding hangs in her studio. “You can’t do it over again. You just can’t reschedule,” she says. “If you miss it, you miss it.”

— by Meghan McEwen for The Wedding Photojournalist Association