When BuzzFeed and Bored Panda pick up one of your photos, you know it has struck a chord with viewers.
Such was the case for professional wedding photographers Lanny and Erika Mann of Two Mann Studios, who recently had a bride and groom first dance photo go viral on the Internet. The Manns are members of The International Society Of Professional Wedding Photographers (ISPWP), which holds quarterly competitions among its members and collects photo submissions under different wedding categories. The Manns walked away with several wins, including the first dance photo of a European bride and groom captured at Lake Louise’s Deer Lodge Inn.
“That one’s actually a documentary shot, so it wasn’t set up or anything, it was taken right during the first dance,” Erika Mann said. “It’s just a straight photojournalism shot, there wasn’t really anything set up other than our lights and being ready in case something might happen.”
For the Manns, it’s all about anticipating the moment and being in the right place at the right time with the right lights – basically, being prepared to be lucky.
Erika – “We have a whole presentation that we do at conferences called The Art of Getting Lucky and there’s a lot of things we recommend to people to sort of put themselves in the best situation,”
Lanny – “Sticks on the ice, keeping your cameras up.”
EM – “We shoot a lot, we say shoot the s--t out of it. On a typical wedding we come home with 10,000 frames and that just really helps our chances of getting lucky.”
LM – “It’s not just spraying and praying, every frame is made with the deliberate purpose of trying to make each one better than the previous frame and ultimately, a lot of it is knowing when to step on the gas when the moments are happening at the right place and the right time.”
EM – “I’ve seen a lot of very lazy photographers out there, there will be lots of moments happening all over the place, but their cameras are down by their sides. But it really depends on the mindset going into the wedding.
LM – “A lot of that is rooted in our approach of being photojournalist-type wedding photographers. Literally 95 per cent of the day for us is just straight photojournalism, so there’s no intervening, gesturing or directing or fabricating, apart from the portraits. That’s a very small portion of the day, directing and using light and whatnot. The vast majority of the day for us is documenting what’s happening.
EM – “There’s so many stories on a wedding day. The obvious story is the bride and groom getting married, but especially during the reception, there’s so many little stories that are taking place, little stories within big stories – it’s going and finding all of those.”
LM – “We shoot with manufactured off-camera flash, especially indoors, 90 per cent of the time and often we’ll have a flash on camera triggering one off camera as well so it will have two light sources. We just got big news yesterday, we have been recognized now as the top two wedding photographers in the world.”
EM – “ISWP is The International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers and they have a quarterly contest every three months and at the end of the year they publish all of the first-ranked photos from all of the contests, so that one was a first ranked one and there were three other photos that got ranked in categories of first place as well.”
LM – “Throughout 2014 we had four of our images win first place in their respected categories, so at the end of the year all of those first-place images from the contests through the year get published on their site and this year it went viral and got picked up.”
