Exceptions

Just to clarify this a bit, I don't hate all wedding portraits. In fact, I think our mothers might murder me if we forewent them altogether. (And I'm not entirely sure we'd guarantee a photo of my brother without a set portrait list, which would be altogether distressing when flipping through the albums in years to come.) So I get it.  But, I really can't stand the way mainstream blogs have begun celebrating the "artistic" bride and groom shots that look like magazine-perfect, flattened-personality, pretty-yet-cold, editorial-worthy photos. Maybe one or two, I could forgive. But I've literally had to scroll past pages of these portraits before ever hitting the good scrunchy-face-and-tears stuff on some big-time photographers blogs. And these portraits seem to be the first bride-and-groom (yeah, it's usually bride-and-groom) shots celebrated on most mainstream photo-heavy blogs. And sometimes the scrunchy-face-and-tears photos never get featured at all.

Blech.  My portraits are going to rock because they're going to be as ridiculous as we are.  In fact, I quite like ridiculous posed portraits. For example, of all the weddings I've pored through on the internet, this was the first portrait that made me jump up and say Hell Yeah.

Ridiculousness courtesy of the Thirty-Something Bride. Photo by Jonathon Campbell

In Louise's own words: "I'm not exactly sure how this started, but my brother and I have been doing this for decades. If I'm remembering it correctly, he and I were young and were acting up (Southern for misbehaving) one day. Someone (I want to say my dad, but it could have been my mom) told us to knock it off and to stop acting like little cretins. The adults left the room and I asked Austin what a cretin was. He made this weird face at me and made a strange sort of snorting noise and said, "That's a cretin." I mimicked him the best I could and said, "Like this?" And he said, "Yeah, like that!" And thus, The Cretin Face was born. It lives on to this day."

Um, I'm a total cretin, and I totally love this.  Particularly because Jason and I have a ridiculous face ritual of our own.  And good lord if we DON'T include it in our posed photos, it will be an entirely inauthentic wedding. Here's us being normal... or a good approximation thereof. (Excuse the shiny faces because, as you will clearly see, our ridiculousness requires a wee bit of alcohol.)

Now, here's us doing the "spitty face":

It started years ago when a friend introduced us to a website devoted to people making these faces (no, I can't remember it now) and it immediately became our group's thing. We own the spitty face, at every semi-tipsy gathering.  Since then, it's just radiated outward, across the nation. We've managed to convince nearly ALL our tipsy friends to get in on the fun (the above photos were taken in Brooklyn, by two equally spitty-faced fools who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this post). I think we have dozens of these things - of us, various groups of friends, and my boss (yes, really). Because admit it, the spitty face is just that awesome. After a beer or two you'd toooootally want to try too.  In fact, I'm going to see if I can convince my mother to join in with the fun at the wedding.  My dad might be hesitant, but I bet I could convince my mom to take part in some mother-daughter spitty faces. 

So yes, I make a firm exception for portraiture ridiculousness and general personality. Because THIS is what I mean by authenticity. Hell Yeah.