Canon BP WPOY 2016 -17: Top 50 in Family and Friends Category

With the judging complete of the Canon Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year 2016-17 contest, we will be revealing the top 50 photographs that made it to each of the six categories—Bride and Groom Portraiture, Family and Friends, Emotions, Behind the Scenes or Offbeat, Finer Wedding Details or Still Life and Photoseries on a single Wedding. Let’s look first at the Family and Friends category.

Family and friends breathe life into a wedding. Whether it is helping the bride and groom get ready for the main day or celebrating in their joyous union, a wedding without friends and family is incomplete. Weddings are also a platform for both the families and friends from the bride’s and groom’s side to come together and get to know each other. This often leads to wonderful, unexpected moments, making it all the more pertinent for the wedding photographer to capture the moment from both the sides, as they mingle and dance during the course of the celebration. Wedding photographers can also creatively interpret their presence, one of the ways being by photographing the inanimate objects left behind by the guests.

“Overall my experience judging the images was excellent. A couple of categories were almost difficult to judge because of the high calibre of each entry.”

—Milind Ketkar, Wedding photographer with over two decades of experience in various genres of photography, Judge for Canon Better Photography Wedding Photographer of the Year 2016-17.

Here are the contestants who made it to our Top 50 list:

Special Mention: Two photographs by Amit Datwani, Bilwanath Chatterjee and Sandip Kumar Mojidra were selected in the top 50.

Here’s a look at some of the best photographs from the category…

The top 6 from each category will be revealed in the January 2017 issue of Better Photography!