WPJA Award winning wedding photography by David Pullum

Honoured yet again to receive an award from the WPJA, in my view one of the better organisations to be a member of.

Why? Because its not judged by wedding photographers. The credentials of these judges are pretty amazing.

David Leeson is a Pulitzer Prize winner .

Michael Ainsworth a former staff photographer at the Dallas Morning News.

Susan Walsh a former staff at AP and president of the White House News Photographers 

Jen Tse a photo editor based in New York

These are people that I want my work to be judged by, they dont give an image an award based on its familiarity, but on its merits in regards to composition, moment and light. It's rare to see trendy wedding images with filters win anything at WPJA, which is exactly the reason I rejoined the association after nearly 6 years away.

Award winning is a term these days that is thrown about like confetti. A lot of wedding photography awards are not judged by people who even have an understanding of photography. The WPJA sets itself apart because what I would call "proper photographers" and people associated with the photography industry judge the images and that means alot to me and I imagine all the other members.

I left for a number of reasons. The main one being that I felt a lot of the winning images back in 2013 were being set up and posed. When I first joined the WPJA in 2007 I was initially rejected because there was a larger percentage of posed images rather than natural ones on my site. When I was accepted it was one of the best moments of my then fledgling career.

47 award winning images and having the distinction of an image being awarded every year since 2007 I decided to leave and stopped entering my images. Last year I started to miss having my work judged, and as I am a bit of a competitive soul, I can't lie, I also missed the competition.

Competition makes you work harder, it makes you look at yourself and ask the question " am I doing enough?". With this question and more ringing in my ears I decided that 2019 was the year I would rejoin the WPJA and start entering again.

With the Q1 results published yesterday I was honoured to have this image awarded a WPJA Masterpiece, keeping up my record of an image winning an award every year that I have been a member, taking my number of awards to 42. My aim for 2019 is to hit the 50 mark by the end of the year. A lot of hard work needs to be put in before I get to that level but I am looking forward to the challenge ahead of me.

Wedding photographer David Pullum has recently been voted one of the best wedding photographers in UK 2020