Candid camera: Take a photographer along on your honeymoon

A new generation of brides and grooms is taking candid wedding photography to a fresh level. Couples are taking photographers along on their honeymoons, a bold few even coughing up the courage to pose for aesthetic frames in the nude.

Couples are hiring fashion and art photographers to capture candid wedding moments. And photographers are cashing in on the Indian bridal market estimated to be worth a staggering $3 billion according to Fotoley.com, a startup for hiring photographers.

Anup J Kat is popular in the wedding circuit for his offbeat imagery, including surreal underwater shoots. Essentially a fashion pho tographer, Kat charges Rs 1 lakh a day for wedding shoots."Weddings finance my holidays and camera lenses. We joke how we take up 10 weddings to get that most-wanted lens," quips Kat, who handles about 20 wedding shoots a year.

Currently , Kat is experimenting with art-inspired frames. "A bride posed like a goddess in a Raja Ravi Verma canvas. A couple posed in an empty space and later an artist painted around the subjects," says Kat.

ET spoke with some couples who had engaged photographers to tag along on their honeymoons but they all declined to be quoted for this story . The photographers, many of them specialists in other fields, were more forthcoming.

Lakshmi Venkatesh, a sports journalist-turned-candid wedding photographer, notes how Bollywood-driven wedding mar ket has sustained photography in India. "Photojournalism does not pay . I shot images at night clubs for Rs 500 for four hours. Today for weddings, I charge Rs 75,000 for two days," says Venkatesh. He finds honeymoon photography the lat est fascination. "Couples want to document their honeymoon in an artistic way ."

Some lensmen take to wedding photography for art's sake. Like Nimish Jain, a fashion and art photographer who brings humour to wedding canvases at Rs 2 lakh a day .Adding illustrations to wedding imagery is his latest experiment. "Wedding photography is the most difficult form of photography . You cover 300-odd people over three days. Post-process takes four weeks," says Jain, who incorporates elements from his fashion and interior shoots into wedding photography .

But art comes with a heavy price tag. Like Kat, Mark Swaroop too charges Rs 1 lakh a day from clients, many of whom he says are nonresident Indians or couples who have studied abroad.

"Wedding photography is an amalgamation of all photography genres -fashion, product and portrait," says Swaroop. "Like war photography , candid wedding photography needs one to have presence of mind."