Picture this: What makes funny wedding photos funny? Below, I’ve chosen 50 of my wedding photos to illustrate the many different ways in which a wedding photo can make people smile.

Funny Wedding Photos

Every every time I pick up a camera, more than anything else I’m trying to create an image that will make people smile. Along with capturing the emotion, love and beauty of weddings, humour is big part of my style of documentary wedding photography. For sure, weddings can be very funny occasions, as well as romantic and emotional. But photographing people having fun and creating interesting, funny wedding photos can be two very different things.

As a guest at a wedding we might have a fun time chatting and joking with friends, having a drink and letting our hair down on the dance floor. And as a wedding photographer I love to document this kind of fun and atmosphere. But there’s much more to creating an interesting photo that makes people laugh or smile – and this, for me, is what makes photography endlessly fascinating.

Before I became a wedding photographer I edited a photography magazine and website. It involved studying the work of great photographers and interviewing many of them. I became fascinated by documentary and street photography, particularly when it told a story, especially a humorous one.

I consumed work by the likes of British photographers Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, along with the great Magnum agency photographers such as Elliott Erwitt and Richard Kalvar. Then there were the influential American street photographers like Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston.

Of course, to produce photos anything like those of these great photographers requires observation, anticipation, positioning and framing. But crucially, it also requires an understanding of the language of photography that they have helped to form.

So what makes funny wedding photos funny?

And what is that language? Sometimes it’s as simple as capturing someone doing something funny. And there is plenty of that in the pictures I’ve chosen below. But sometimes it’s about how something is framed, for example, seeing the world from a child’s eye level; or standing in the right place to tell a funny story; or simply creating a visual illusion or a ‘what’s-going-on-there?’ photo. The juxtaposition of two or more contrasting elements – such as young and old, or serious and funny – also often works well. Or the repetition of body language, or simply the capturing of ‘earthlings being earthlings’, as Richard Kalvar might have said. And where better to do all of this but at weddings!

I hope you like the funny wedding photos I’ve chosen below. You can read more about my approach to wedding photography. And if you’re planning to get married and like my style I’d love you to get in touch.