Named Top Ten Wedding Photographer by American PHOTO

This month I was named one of American PHOTO’s top ten wedding photographers for 2008!

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What an honor this is! Thank you Lindsay Sakraida, writer for American PHOTO Magazine, for the interview and write up. My interview was inspired by the destination Indian weddings that I shoot.

Click here for the whole article.

Excerpt: For Karen Wise, there was little possibility of falling victim to wedding photography convention; before her career informally began with a friend’s wedding, she had only been to one small one in her entire life. “At the time, I really had no idea about the traditional wedding rituals,” she says of her first assignment. “The first dance, the cake cutting, and all that. I think not knowing the conventions helped me to take interesting photos. It made my shooting very photojournalistic since I was discovering a lot of wedding traditions as I shot.”

She was armed, however, with a fine-art degree and extensive experience photographing food and still life, which came in handy in her matrimonial endeavors. “I found I had to take all of these skills and speed them up in order to capture everything I wanted to get,” she says. “I found that to be exhilarating.” Her colorful, detail-oriented style has attracted numerous clients in the New York area, where she is based; but she has shot weddings as far away as India, including one in which a baby elephant was given as a wedding gift, popular musician Abida Parveen performed in the garden from Monsoon Wedding, decor was coordinated with guests’ outfits, and famed shoe-designer Christian Louboutin hand-delivered the footwear. “A photographer couldn’t ask for a more inspiring setting [Udaipur’s palaces] in which to create beautiful photographs,” Wise says. “Everywhere you looked was beautiful and photogenic.” But she once again had to learn on her feet about traditions she was unfamiliar with: those of a full-blown Indian nuptial extravaganza.  – Lindsey Sakraida

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