For Dane Tucker, a strong sense of narrative and emotion comes before everything. “Beautiful on its own isn’t enough,” he says.

When he first started out in wedding photography, Tucker tended to make everything dark and moody because, he says, that was what resonated most with him. “I eventually realized that doesn’t fit all couples or all situations. While there are tones, lighting setups, moods and aesthetic styles I am very much drawn to, nowadays I shoot and edit to make best use of the ambient light to tell the story that is in front of me.”

Overarching everything, Tucker wants to create images that people can look at and get an incredibly strong sense of the people in them and what they are like. “I want strangers who have never met the subjects to be able to look at a set of images and almost feel like they know who they are. And I want to do so while producing images that are simultaneously both cinematic and incredibly intimate,” he sums up.

Check out the official announcement of this year’s 30 Rising Stars of Wedding Photography, along with the editors’ observations on the list of 2021.