In 2017 I took part in Snap Camp, a wedding photography workshop run by Snap Studio in Kawkowo, a village in Masuria. It was led by Marcin Kontraktewicz and Nat Kontraktewicz. Two intense days of shooting, and intense not only technically but mentally and in business terms too. A workshop that long, with a fairly small group, is also where you meet people and make business contacts. You could call Snap Camp a holiday with photography running through it.
Kawkowo in Masuria
Kawkowo is a beautiful place: an old country house with ten rooms, four bathrooms and plenty of other space besides. The owners who looked after our stay prepared not only room to learn, practise and rest, but wonderful local food as well.
Photos from the workshop
I get the impression that a lot of people come to photography workshops to build their portfolio out of workshop photos. To me that is a real letdown when it becomes their main way of promoting themselves, because there are two problems with it. The first is that these are not really our own photographs, the ones we put ourselves into. Someone else chose the place, the hour and the styling, picked the models and even posed them. In a place as lovely as Kawkowo the photos take themselves. The second is that if five or ten people have the same idea, and then a couple looking for a wedding photographer sees similar photos on several different websites, they will think something is off.
To step away from that pattern a little, I decided to photograph the whole day with a single 50mm f/1.4 lens and in black and white only, to look behind the scenes, which turned out to be every bit as interesting as the styled sessions. I shot some of the workshop part too, in a similar mood. With the flare photos, though, I left a bit of colour.
Do not copy
I do not want to give away the programme, but one thing I took from it is exactly this: do not copy other people’s ideas, because your photography will never stand out that way. Hundreds of photographers today take pictures so alike that you can barely tell them apart, because they are made to whatever is in fashion, lately turning everything orange. The worst part is when someone then calls it natural wedding photography, and the only colours in their pictures all year round are yellow, orange, brown and the famous washed-out greens.
Those photos remind me of the mobile phone market, where one manufacturer copies another’s shapes and ideas. Some go further and copy the colours, the typography and the way the products are promoted. In the end the only thing that sets them apart is price and marketing budget. People stop being able to tell them apart and, for all that promotion, forget about them and pick a different manufacturer two years later.
