I Photographed Two Hundred Weddings Before I Understood What Light Was Doing

My first wedding was in a hall in Ibadan in 2014. I arrived with a borrowed camera, a flash I did not understand, and a belief that more light made a better picture.

I shot nearly nine hundred frames that day. I remember very little of it, except that I was sweating through my shirt and that the bride’s grandmother told me, kindly, “Young man, you are making everyone look like they are at a police station.”

She was right. My flash was blasting white light straight into every face. The photographs were sharp and flat, and nobody looked like themselves.

I went home that night embarrassed and worked out that I had a decision to make. I could become a photographer who took pictures at weddings, or I could become a photographer who understood what he was looking at.

The long middle

The next six years were the grind. I shot weekends, edited weeknights, and kept my day job at a printing press in Ikeja. I learned the ordinary things: how to find the bride before the makeup artist finished, how to ask elders to stand where the light would be kind, how to read a room’s mood from the way the aunties arranged their gele.

By the time I had photographed two hundred weddings, I was technically good. Clients paid on time. Planners recommended me. I could produce a gallery of three hundred clean, well exposed images from any hall in Lagos.

But I remember a quiet afternoon in 2020, looking back through my portfolio, and feeling nothing. The pictures were competent, polished and forgettable.

The wedding that changed it

In October of that year, a couple booked me for a small outdoor ceremony in Epe. Forty guests, a tent, a few plastic chairs, and a lagoon behind the compound where the groom’s family lived.

I arrived early. I always do. The ceremony was set for four in the afternoon, and at about three thirty I walked to the edge of the water, intending to scout angles. The sun was dropping behind the trees on the far bank, and the light had gone the colour of palm oil.

I stood there for ten minutes doing nothing. I just watched what the light did to things. It touched the water first, then the grass, then slowly climbed the tent poles. A little girl in a yellow dress was running along the bank, and every time she crossed a patch of sun, she seemed to glow for a second and then go out.

For the first time in six years, I was not thinking about my settings. I was just looking.

I put the flash in my bag and zipped it shut.

Shooting the ceremony

I will be honest: it was frightening. Without the flash, the tent was dim. My shutter speeds dropped. I missed a few frames, soft, blurred, imperfect. I felt the old anxiety in my chest, the voice that said a client would be disappointed.

But as the ceremony went on, the light did what I had watched it do at the water. When the groom’s father stood to pray, a bar of gold fell across his face from a gap in the tent. When the bride came out, the low sun caught the edges of her veil and turned it into something almost liquid. I stopped trying to fill the room with light and started letting the room speak.

By the end of the afternoon, I had shot only two hundred and ten frames. It was my smallest number ever. I drove home certain I had failed.

The gallery

Delivering that gallery was the most nervous I have ever been. I sent the link on a Tuesday evening and sat by my phone.

The bride called within the hour. She did not say hello. She said, “How did you do this?”

I asked what she meant.

“My father is in these pictures,” she said. “He looks like himself. Nobody else has ever photographed him like this.”

Her father, I learned, had been difficult to photograph all his life. He had a stern face that cameras flattened into something harsher than the man himself. In my pictures, lit by an accident of sun through canvas, he looked tender. He looked like someone who had just been told his daughter was safe.

She told me she was going to print one of them for the family house in Epe.

What I teach now

I run workshops for younger photographers once a quarter. The first hour, I do not let anybody touch a camera. I take them outside and ask them to describe the light for ten minutes. Where is it coming from? What is it doing to skin? What is it doing to the fabric? Where is it going?

Most of them hate the exercise at first. By the end, they are quiet.

I do not hate flash. I still use it, for dance floors and dark halls. I just no longer reach for it by habit.

I think often of that grandmother in Ibadan, who told me I was making everyone look like they were at a police station. She was the first person to teach me about light, though neither of us knew it.

Two hundred weddings taught me technique. One afternoon at the edge of a lagoon taught me to see. If you are starting out, shoot as many frames as you can. But somewhere in the middle of all that work, put your camera down and watch what the light is doing. It has been telling stories for a lot longer than we have.