Not just one for the album: Pre-wedding photography the new Indian fad

Pre-wedding photography - and sets, costumes, make-up and styling - is the latest craze to hit wedding-obsessed Indians

Pinky Agarwal and Tarun Agarwal clink their wine glasses as they get clicked. Pinky wears a blue dress, black pumps and black shades, smiling widely as Tarun, clad in a grey suit, whispers in her ear. The carefree couple then traipses through cobbled streets that lead to a 30-ft-tall clock tower, beside which rests an old town pub replete with wooden beer mugs and barrel. Yellow-grey Victorian statues line the street as do staircases with walkable balconies and white balusters.
 
No, this is not a scene out of a picturesque medieval European village, but a “Spanish Old Town” set. It is 20 feet high, 40 feet wide and about 75 feet long, allowing for a 360-degree view that caters to both cinematography and photography.
 
Photographer Ashok Pasi directs the affianced couple, refreshing their memories of their respective photogenic profiles, encouraging them to let go of their inhibitions despite being surrounded by an entire team. A make-up artist, a hair stylist and a light-man all stand at attention.

A couple live a ‘Tuscany Street’ moment on a set in Faridabad | Courtesy: Hitched & clicked

 
The couple are not actors in a play. They are living out their pre-wedding fantasy at The Perfect Location (TPL), a photo studio spread across three acres, housing 30 indoor and outdoor sets in Faridabad near Delhi. Other than the “Spanish Old Town set”, TPL offers a walkable street in Tuscany, an outdoor bedroom, a ranch and a village shed with a picnic and camping spot. “All I wanted before our wedding was a fun shoot, something the two of us can do together and remember forever,” beams Pinky.
 
Bengaluru and Mumbai, too, have young couples investing in pre-wedding photography to send out “save-the-date” messages and wedding invites over social media platforms. “The worlds of Instagram and Facebook seem to have made movie stars of everyone,” says Sunitha Joseph, co-founder of a garden-styled events venue called Elements outside Bengaluru. “Everyone has a camera these days but people come in with three professional photographers and with at least eight different outfits.” Joseph has just switched to online reservations after people waited in their parking area for hours together.
 

A destination pre-wedding shoot in Muscat | Courtesy: Ramit Batra

Elements previously had nine rooms built around four different mandap landscapes among high hedges and some 200 trees, but it is now building three more green rooms  to handle the many outfits couples bring along — plus big mirrors, shelves for curling irons, and so on. People have also begun to prefer private venues over public spaces, feels Joseph.
 
Wedding planner Dhawal Oza, who runs DreamZ Events N Ideas in Mumbai, makes available all props needed to create the “higher-end glam or regal look”. He hires yachts, choppers, vintage cars and horse chariots by the hour. He hired a hot air balloon recently for a man who wanted to propose to his girlfriend mid-air. His photographers work with battery-operated fog machines, colour bombs and bonfires.
 
They usually do this in the wee hours at the Gateway of India and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, or in locations outside Mumbai such as Aamby Valley. Not just the more affluent clients, but even the salaried middle class is giving into their children’s expensive choices. GoPro cameras and drone videos are commonplace. Typically, over three days of a wedding, couples spend anywhere between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 40 lakh on photographs.
 
Wedding photography, with a schedule built along the lines of the release of a Bollywood film, packed with teasers, film trailers and post-production promotion, is now a booming industry offering pre-wedding and post-wedding shoots along with the customary wedding-day snaps and films. If it has crossed your mind that photography at weddings has become an event in itself, with photo booths and floral backdrops for celeb-like pictures as common installations, the pre-wedding photography trend is the latest update to the trend. Fashion always pushes forward. Thanks to social media, people across the world are exposed to real-time updates of global trends. Celebrities have possibly never been more influential, and emulating how celebrities live their lives seems to provide a sense of validation to young people. Photographic documentation of their wedding offers them a chance to create and be primary players in their very own Bollywood saga.
 
Back in 2014, Madhulika and Nimesh Bansal, owners of TPL, were entrusted with the task of managing photography for a family member’s wedding. The photographer couple came up with various ideas on the theme, the clothes  and even choice of venue. But like at any big fat Indian wedding, the family and the couple disagreed about most things. The Bansals then founded The Perfect Location as a venue that was “perfect” for couples who needed choice. “We only take three couples at a time  and we want each one of those to have their privacy. We want them to feel special, just like a celebrity at their own shoot,” says Madhulika.
 
TPL, like most other such shoot venues, does not offer an in-house photographer or stylist as it is open for all. Couples usually bring along their own photographers, make-up artists and hair stylists. Most such venues follow the same principle. At TPL, for a four-hour shoot that allows the use of three different backdrops, the cost is Rs 15,000; an eight-hour shoot with six different backdrops costs Rs 30,000. The total cost, including pre-wedding pictures and videos can end up between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh.
 
Ramit Batra, a  photographer based in Delhi, has been in the business of wedding and lifestyle photography since 2009. He entered this lucrative world by photographing friends’ weddings in Delhi. A decade ago, pre-wedding shoots were being done by few, usually big business families that had a large amount of money set aside for wedding expenses, including staged photography. Couples would pose embracing each other, and share these pictures with friends and family, usually to announce their engagement. Batra feels the trend has really taken off now, as many young people actively post updates about their lives on social media; the days of wedding ostentation being considered shamefully extravagant are clearly long past.
 
Manleen Puri began accompanying couples to their pre-wedding shoots around the same time that the craze for pre-wedding shoots began a few years ago. With shoots lined up months before the wedding, this make-up artist now has no time off. “Gone are the days when make-up artists were only busy in July and August, and later from November to February,” says Puri. Naturally, she thinks this trend is fantastic: “Now, you can practise your art and make money all year round.”
 
To get “non-gimmicky, candid” pictures of the couple, Batra offers a pre-wedding shoot consultation with a two-hour-long photo shoot, which helps him “foster a relationship with the couple” — for Rs 70,000. Over and above the consultation, the basic shoot package costs Rs 1.25 lakh, where Batra clicks the couple at three different locations in Delhi and NCR over six hours. Sometimes the couple want Batra and his production team, consisting of editors and other photographers, to travel with them to different destinations, too. Batra has a studio in Delhi’s upscale Defence Colony. But he travels constantly for shoots in different parts of the country and the world. His 2019 calendar is booked up till December.
 
Frolicking around sets and travelling to exotic destinations remain the preserve of the well-heeled. Those with less money to splash around simply turn to attractive public areas. Lodi Gardens and Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi are two popular venues, bustling with couples posing for photographers at various hours of the day.
 
One such couple is all geared up for a shoot on a Tuesday morning. Shruti Shah and Pankaj Sharma, dressed in complementary shades of pink, are standing on the Athpula bridge in Lodi Gardens. The fact that they are blocking the path of joggers and walkers deters neither them nor their photographers. They had been posing for an hour when Shah and Sharma ran towards the nearest public toilet to change for the next shoot. Ask Shah how she manages costumes and make up without help and she says, “Pankaj and I are more than happy to change and get ready in these toilets as long as we have a good photographer.” They will pay their photographer, Siddharth Yadav, Rs 20,000 for the project, including prints.
 
In Cubbon Park in the heart of Bengaluru, where rows of mighty silver oaks and gulmohars thrive alongside clusters of bamboo trees, it’s common to see people settled on benches after jogging, or playing Frisbee on the 300-odd acres. But sometime over the last couple of years, the verdant setting became a hot cake for pre-wedding shoots, too. As did the botanical garden of Lal Bagh. But even as regular visitors carry their camera onto the premises of these two lungs of the city, professional shoots have been banned by the department of horticulture, after complaints from joggers and biologists.
 
This has resulted in wedding venues in Bengaluru accommodating pre-wedding shoots. “We’ve seen an increase of 20 to 25 per cent bookings for pre-wedding shoots in the past few months alone,” says Neeraja Nagarajan from the marketing team at The Tamarind Tree, an upscale wedding venue in Bengaluru. On average, venues celebrating exclusivity cost anywhere between Rs 6,000 and Rs 30,000, for a maximum of eight hours.
 
According to a Hindu Business Line report published in April 2017, the wedding industry in India is valued at Rs 33,000 crore, the world’s second-largest after USA’s $70-billion (Rs 4.9 lakh crore) market. It’s difficult to estimate what slice of that massive pie owes to pre-wedding business. “The pre-wedding industry is still at a very nascent stage,” says Bengaluru’s Nishant Ratnakar, a candid wedding photographer. “Things are still quite haphazard in their execution, but it’ll soon get streamlined as more such shoots happen.”
 
Meanwhile, back at TPL in Delhi, Pinky and Tarun are taking a break between photo shoots. Under the glare of the dressing room lights, they sip green tea and nibble on cookies while the make-up artist readies them for the next shoot. It will soon be action time again for the stars of the day.