Best Jewish Wedding Photographers

"Best" is the wrong word and the right search. Nobody can tell you who the best Jewish wedding photographer is, but anyone who has photographed a great many of them can tell you what to look for, and that is what this page is for. The galleries underneath it are real weddings we photographed, which is the only honest way to make the case.

A Jewish wedding is a different job from a wedding. The evening has an order that does not bend — kabbalas panim and the tish, the badeken, the walk to the chuppah, the yichud room, the first dance and the mechitza dancing that runs until the band stops — and most of the moments that matter happen once, fast, in a crowd. The badeken is over in a minute and the only angle is the one you are already standing in. The chuppah may be outdoors, in the dark, under a single light. The dancing is a wall of men on one side and a wall of women on the other, and a photographer who covers one side well has photographed half the wedding. So the first thing to look for is simple: has this photographer shot many Jewish weddings, and can you see them? Not a Jewish wedding in a portfolio of fifty beach weddings — a shelf of them.

The second thing is the crew. The men's side and the women's side are two rooms, the kallah's portraits before the badeken and the chosson's tish are at the same time in different places, and a single photographer, however good, is only in one of them. Ask how many people are on the floor and how the two sides are covered. Ask the same about video, because photo and film from two companies means two crews standing in the same doorway at the chuppah; ours are one in-house team, so the film and the photographs come from people who planned the evening together.

The third is the room. We are a Toms River house, a short drive from Lakewood, and we have photographed in many of the halls a family in New Jersey, Brooklyn, Monsey, Teaneck, Long Island, Philadelphia or Baltimore would book — which matters because the light in each of them is different and the good spots for the chuppah and the family photographs are learned, not guessed. A photographer who knows your hall arrives with a plan; one who does not spends the first hour making one.

The last thing is whether people say so afterwards. We have a long shelf of five-star Google reviews from families who have been through the evening with us, and the reviews say what the photographs cannot: whether the team was easy to have in the room, whether the gallery came when promised, whether the album was worth the wait. Read them, then look at the weddings below, and if you want to know whether your date is free, tell us the date.