Parejo Photos – Wedding photographers with journalistic soul

Thank you Alberto for this opportunity. We’re happy to have you for this interview and being able to share your work. Would you like to start by presenting yourself to the readers?
Since 2011 we started with our exclusive work of wedding photography. Why dream it, if you can live it? – we say. That’s why our job is to capture your dream with photographs converted into real stories of real people, without artifices and impossible poses. If what you want is to keep forever what really happened the most important day of your life, we know how to express it in that different and spontaneous way that you like so much.

For this, we seek to create complicity with you, your family and your friends to achieve the maximum graphic expression of that day. With our photographs we try that your memories remain indelible so that, instead of dreaming, you can live it.

We are Alberto and Teresa, together we decided to convert what we are passionate about in our work and since then we have lived photo-documentary (which is how we like to call what we do) as the way of telling stories through the image.

We do not want to be another service, we need to know why you like our photos, we want complicity to such an extent that it is not strange to make our wedding day, what we care about are you, your wedding, your family and friends, your parties, a celebration that we will always remember… because we were also there.

When did you get interested in photography for the first time?
Since I was a child I had a camera in my hands and the first works with 10 years were for the school newspaper, to report the day to day of teaching in those years. Since childhood, having the power to freeze something for life was something unique and unmatched.

What led you to become a professional photographer?
The different stages of my life led me to focus all my effort on being a professional photographer since I always had a camera in my hands and felt the need to do what I liked most as a way of life.

How would you describe your approach to wedding photography?
For me, without a doubt, what rewards everything is to be able to tell things in a way that when the years pass, people continue to be excited, just like the first day. I not only want to photograph what happened at that moment but also what they felt at that precise moment.

Do you still remember the equipment you used at the first wedding you did?
Yes of course it was a Canon 5D mark II because I loved colors. No doubt the color and quality of the files was one of the things I was looking for.

What is your current configuration of cameras and lenses in an assignment?
At the moment I use two Fuji X-T3 with four different lenses. In one of them the Fujinon XF 23mm f/2 and the Fujinon XF 10-24mm f/4 R, and in the other one the Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2 R and the Fujinon XF 90mm F2 R LM WR.

Could you explain the reason for your choices for cameras and focal lengths?
I always like to use both cameras at the same time, with a wide-angle in one and a telephoto in the other to cover all the focal spectra that you may need.

I feel most comfortable with the XF 23mm F2 and the XF 56mm f/1.2 R.

What are the advantages of the Fuji X system for the type of approach it takes for this type of event?
The advantages in the approach are brutal with respect to other equipment with the configurations of face detection and the automatic approach to the eye that makes it very accurate. But undoubtedly what we find most useful with the incorporation of Fuji 3 years ago to our work is the size of the bodies and lenses that make you one more in the event you want to photograph, not only going unnoticed, but also participating in the same event as just one more.

We understand that you work as a team, right? Does Teresa also use Fuji equipment?
Teresa is my wife and my other half in Parejo Photos, our company for social and wedding photography. She also works with Fuji, which adapts perfectly to her way of photographing.

Having both team members using the same camera system is a great advantage, isn’t it?
To work both with the same system of equipment is a great advantage in all the senses, with the greater use of the lenses, in the similarity of the files for the post processing, but especially in the same philosophy of photojournalistic work.

Working in Parejo Photos as a team, we do a more homogeneous work.

After a full day of coverage of a wedding, you will surely return home with a few thousand photos. Could you describe your workflow to handle this amount of information until you deliver the final results to the clients?
Once we finish a wedding we usually have about 12,000 photos and the first thing we do is make several backup copies so that the work for our clients is safe and on the same day we select the most outstanding photos of the wedding. Later we make a first screening in which we leave that amount in half, and just after we do a new selection to make a final capture of 1,000 photos, which will be the ones we deliver to the client. For this selection we are concerned that all photos have a coherence in everything, composition, color, information, description of the moment, etc.

You have been developing a series of personal projects in the area of ​​documentary photography. Although they have nothing to do with wedding photography, do you think this also helps you develop your wedding work?
Starting from the professional base of my work, I have been carrying out personal projects for many years, influenced by the most intimate customs of the Lower Guadalquivir region. For this reason, it is very useful for me to constantly learn about the behavior of people, to learn more every day about them and how to photograph them.

For many years I have been dedicating a lot of time to my project of documentary photography of customs.