You don't need advanced photography skills and equipment to take good DIY wedding photos. Our experience showed us that even a point-and-shoot digital camera does a great job when the subjects are genuinely cheerful, interact well with the environment, and are lit nicely by natural light. Indeed, these are the key elements that make our pictures work.

No matter what kind of camera you have, you can get great results by paying close attention to Posing, the Composition of the picture, Lighting, and by enjoying the process. Honestly, the joy of your smiles comes from the depths of your hearts. You are simply the best subjects for your own photos when you are happy. Then capturing your sweetest moments, you just need to find the right composition and well-lit faces.

Sometimes, too much attention to the technicality of photography can be counterproductive when you take pictures of people. All great people pictures have that hint of spontaneity in them. Can you capture that wink if it takes you two minutes to get right the tripod, filter, medium format film, or the exposure for your dear slides? Do you think your bride will be annoyed if you need to fiddle with the camera for five minutes before every shots? Drop all distractions from technical intricacies. You simply do not need your equipment to be perfect. Sometimes not even a sharp focus! What you need, though, is the perfect subject, you and your bride. The look on her has nothing at all to do with how well you can control your camera. Rather, it has everything to do with how well you execute the photo taking session. Are you keeping it fun?

That said, to get consistently good results, you do need to know a bit more, especially about exposure. The section on Exposure covers Peter's experience in various exposure techniques. The other photography techniques on this site are written for photography beginners or amateur photographers. If you are an advanced amateur or professional photographer, you are already much better equipped than us! In that case, you can totally go ahead and take your DIY wedding photos — don't hesitate!