What does a small device do at a big fat Indian wedding? Take selfies, of course! Selfies have been used fairly widely in marketing campaigns but have you seen a brand use an entire wedding to put itself out there? The Lumia 730 did just that recently at the wedding of Ankit Agarwal and Prachi Bansal in Delhi, which Microsoft is calling ‘India’s first selfie wedding’.
Delhi-based wedding photographer Vijay Tonk (or Think Tonk as he is known) was mulling the idea of a ‘selfie wedding’ and looking for a suitable phone to experiment with. The Microsoft Lumia 730 seemed right because the 5 MP front camera has a wide angle lens and 10 people could fit into the frame. “It helps to record more than the faces, it can record their clothes, too,” he says, considering that one wants to remember every aspect, every moment from their wedding.
Once he suggested the idea to Microsoft, the company decided to run a contest tagged #selfieshaadi and invited contestants to send pictures to wedding portal wedmegood.com.
The prize-winning couple would win a pre-wedding and wedding selfie photo shoot designed and directed by Tonk. Make-up from a recognised artist was also thrown in, along with a Lumia hamper.
‘Wait, let’s take a selfie before the formal photo’, is a well-known feature of today’s wedding, says Tonk. “Guests keep taking selfies too, so I thought a selfie wedding would be a good idea.”
A selfie wedding “gives power to the couple to capture their own photographs, whenever they want, without a photographer’s intrusion. You can go viral very soon. With a professional, you will have to wait a month for the album to be delivered to you,” he adds.
Tonk and his team directed bride and groom – the former a fashion designer, the latter an executive at a UAE-based firm – on the best angles to take the selfies from, the lighting and the background. He prepared a list of occasions and shots that they should capture – the arrival of the bride and the groom, the band, the wedding ceremony, and the ritual farewell given to the bride at the end. Did anyone object? “No, I had met the family a day or two before the wedding and they were very open to this idea.” What about the priest? “Yes, the priest became impatient. I suggested a selfie for the couple with him, but he was keen on getting the rituals done at the right muhurat (time).”
Tonk, who otherwise uses a Canon 5D Mark 3, edited and processed the shots on the Lumia and gave the couple an album of their selfie shaadi . (Another wedding photographer was hired to do the more formal photography.) T Sridhar, Director-South, Nokia India, a subsidiary of Microsoft Mobiles Oy, says a desktop was not involved in the processing at all. The contest attracted around 100 entries.
In the last couple of years, phone brands have been advertising their cameras’ features, and at this week’s Cannes advertising festival, Apple won the top prize in the Outdoor category for its ‘Shot on iPhone6’ campaign.
The phone, launched last year at an MRP of ₹15,299, comes with a selfie app. Once activated, the shot is set automatically, he explains.
The focal length of the camera, which determines the extent of the subject captured, is 24 mm. Wide angle lenses range from 24 mm to 35 mm.
Last November, the Lumia 730 made news for attempting to take the world’s largest selfie, with 1,151 people, in Bangladesh.
Now, wouldn’t it be fun to identify yourself if you were one of those at the back?