Meet Monica & Pol aka The Richters
Atypical ,crazy, funny , but above all human , enjoy the story of Monica and Pol from the Richters and discover their wonderful univers !
Small introduction, what is your career background ?
Monica has as Degree in photography that she obtained in the Pacific University of Chile where she was a teacher for a year. Pol has studied Technical Architecture but never really finished (95%) , the creative side got me before finishing. I´m self teached.
Why did you choose wedding photography ?
Monica got stolen in her flat: cameras, computers.. She had no money for buying new stuff. A good friend of her was already working as a wedding photographer so she offered Monica to work as a second shooter to save some money. She just said: Ok Monica, just shoot whatever you want, be free, I don't need your pictures, I'm good on my own so be free". As she was totally free to do what she wanted she really liked it and started to shoot weddings.
Pol really spent years playing around with pictures and videos, he liked to create videos for friends and family. He felt really good communicating, creating emotions in the people. Weddings came as a nice canvas to experiment and get some money. Weddings was my filmmaker degree.
What is the difference between your style and more classical ones ?
We are probably not the ones who should say this. Anyways we just try to be honest, we try to document and respect the tone of the day/couple. We don't make people pose, we like to capture things on the fly as it happens. We try to understand and depics what we have in front of us. Not interested in super beautiful portraits on a cliff while the sun is setting, we are not interested in beautiful pictures (without soul) but in pictures that matters. Life is like it is, sometimes it's not perfect and sometimes it is perfect its imperfection. We try not to manipulate, we just adapt ourselves to the things, to every condition. We try to enjoy the wedding vibes, thats why we are not so into labbish weddings, princess type weddings, because everything is so stiff, so without soul.
What is necessary to stand out nowadays ?
Same as it ever was. Try to know who you are, dare to be yourself, create your style, let yourself be. Get inspired but don't copy, don't be average. Then just create your marketing around this (The way you communicate, your social media, your website).
How to find your own style ?
Know who you are, what you like. Be a real photographer. Photography or videography are words after all. Try to be special using these words, make your own variation of the language. You can recognize your friends voices thank to the way they speak, because of the words they uses, the tone, the voice, how they depics situations, the sense of humour... Photography is exactly the same. Discover your voice: how do you perceive life, what do you care about, what do you like and talk about then do the same with your camera. Speaking a language for example french, doesn't make you a poet, you just know the basic to be understood but if you want to be a poet, you need something else, some special way using the language. Go for it.
The secret for a good photo ?
The photo should cross the screen/paper, jump out. It should be real, vivid.
Do you have an anecdote to share with us ?
Once we made a wedding for european hollywood direction assistant (james bond, starwars, fast & furious) , in the wedding there was one of the make up artists of game of thrones, the iron guy of tom cruise who's brought a dildo that angelina jolie gifted to him. That was an amazing wedding, so funny, it lasted 3 days. There was beautiful souls which were having fun to the fullest.
Last year I (Pol) had a wedding in Pais vasco . My flight was berlin /frankfurt frankfurt/bilbao. There was a problem in franfkurt, after hours trying to figure out and having no information, turns out there was no flights anymore and the airline didn't provide any solution. When I was close to call the bride, Monica (she didn´t came with me) finally found a solution. I needed to change terminal and flight to Madrid, but she was like "ok, I bought you a ticket you have exactly 10 min to cross the whole aiport). Franfkurt is the 2nd or 3rd largest airport in europe.. after running madly and making some mistakes, I reached the door. I arrived to Madrid at midnight..
I needed to sleep in the airport for a couple of hours and get a night bus to bilbao (like 6 hours away...)... I arrived... slept like 2 more hours.. wake up to buy some clothes (my luggage was somewhere else in franfkurt).. the car I rented previously of course was cancelled.. .so with taxis and public transport I could finally buy some clothes , get the bus to the airport to rent another car... It was really a disater but I made it... In the way back home I also had some problems, in the aiport because the name in the ID didn´t match the flight ticket name.. they didn´t allow me to take my flight, I almost missed it , I had to call to some airline offfice to fly. A TOTAL MESS. Finally everything went ok.
We thank Monica and Pol for this wonderful article !Want to know more ?
Discover the workshop of Monica & Pol in Paris in janurary !
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