People have wanted to record images of import events since the beginning of time. This is just human nature.
Long before photography was invented, wealthy patrons paid painters to make beautiful portraits of themselves. This was a time consuming process, so it was rare for even a wealthy person to commission a substantial painting to be done on their wedding day. It was nor until the advent of photography that wedding portraits really came in to their own.

With the invention of photography, well to do people could suddenly record images of the most important day of their lives together: their wedding day. This was truly a momentous time in the keeping of memories on this fleeting occasion.

Soon after M. Daguerre invented the daguerreotype, studios were opened up to produce commercial portraits for the rapidly expanding middle classes. They were quite popular even though they were fragile and by no means inexpensive -a Wikipedia article claims that single studio portraits cost on the order of $1000.00-. Needless to say, this brought wedding photography in to the real of possibility, although the process pretty much dictated that the bride and groom would have to stop by a studio on their wedding day.

Not long after the development of the daguerreotype in Europe, Samuel Morse was in Paris to obtain a French patent for his telegraph. He heard about M. Daguerre and his daguerreotypes and brought thee technology the the United States. By the the early 1840s the exposure time had been reduced to between three and five minutes. By the end of the decade this time was reduced to just a few seconds. Mathew Brady opened his first daguerreotype studio in New York City in 1844.

However, the first daguerreotype studio that we know of in California had to wait until the California Gold Rush brought a number of photographers here looking for opportunities to photograph some of the new (and old) rich. The first was Richard H. Carr who opened his studio around January 25, 1949 in San Francisco.

With the development of the "wet plate process" in 1851 and, even more importantly, the "dry plate process" in the early 1970's, photographers could come to weddings, rather than the other way around. This was a great advancement for wedding photography, but the photography was still time consuming process with everything be posed for many minutes. Then, in 1884, George Eastman simplified the whole process even more by doing away with the glass plates and chemicals photographers had had to carry with them previously. Even so, wedding photographs from this time are all looking very posed.

By the 1920's we occasionally see wedding photographs that were not 100% posed, for example shots of the bride and groom just after the ceremony with the wedding party starting to follow them By today's standards, these were all posed, but they were certainly out of the studio!

It was really not until the 1950s and 1960s that wedding photography advance to the point where medium format cameras were available that would allow the beginnings of photojournalistic wedding photography. During this time, some wedding photographers were also mixing medium format photography for the more formal shots with some 35mm photography for more candid moments. The technology was available to do this since the early 1950s, but is was fairly rare: or at least looking through older wedding albums and wedding photos on the web leads us to this observation.

The photojournalistic wedding style of photography really did not really start to show itself until the the early years of the 21st Century. This is rather surprising when one considers that photojournalistic wedding photography and, more importantly, a mix of traditional and photojournalistic styles were technologically feasible since the 1950's. The beginning of the use of digital cameras in wedding photography also But, who is to say what dictates trends in the fashion of wedding photography?

Wikipedia has a more general history of photography that you may also find interesting.

In any case, during this first decade of the 21st Century, there has been a real change in a lot of the requests couples have for wedding photography styles. We now see wedding photographers shooting everything from the extremes of pure traditional wedding photography to pure wedding photojournalism as well as all types of combinations of the two. Not surprisingly, the most popular seems to be a combination of the two of them. As well, the photo-illustrative style is a yet another style that adds in elements of glamour photography like that in fashion magazines along with the other two.

At Fisher Wedding Photography, we prefer to use a mix of all three styles to produce a album that is pleasing and memorable in the decades to come. Naturally, we can taylor this to the couple's individual tastes. This is one of the things that we always bring up during interviews so that we have a better idea of what a couple is looking for in their keepsakes.