Ok so I am no expert and not claiming to be but I did just shoot my first wedding and wanted to share my insights with anyone that may be looking into doing the same thing. These are just a few things that I found important to know and I hope this can be helpful. It is a bit lengthy so I put it on my blog broke into three parts. Hope it is useful to someone.
i would love to do one some day, but i dont know that i would be brave enough knowing i was solely in charge of preserving the memories of someones special day.
Great article Joshua. Some great advice. Yes, scary stuff. You did fantastically and i hope you get some more coming in (if you want them too that is!)
Thanks everyone and Yes I would definitely do one again. It was a rush and a great sense of accomplishment and now I have learned from the first one I want to make adjustments and do better. Then I want to do more and get better, and better. It is an excellent challenge.
Wonderful tips, Joshua! Many very good points and reminders, even for seasoned ol' hags like me who have not one but two - TWO! - weddings as 2nd photog under their belt :-)
And, not to hijack an excellent thread, but if you want to basically *train* for wedding photography...
Get out there and shoot wildlife. Nothing is potentially faster, more unpredictable and less cooperative than a truly wild animal or bird...except maybe a drunken wedding party! You will learn to adjust settings on the fly without thinking (or looking) twice.
Really good article with some great information and tips! By the way, I really liked how your shoot turned out. I tried posting that the other day but got the internal error repeatedly and forgot to try again.
Something wedding shooters may wish to try, if there are two of you... shoot RAW plus small jpeg... and bring a laptop. We (I shot with a friend - first wedding for both of us!) did that at a wedding where my gift was the photography. At the reception, we popped the cards into the laptop, discarded the obvious "oops" shots quickly, then just set it to slideshow and let the pictures run. People LOVED seeing themselves on the screen and really didn't pay that much attention to whether or not it was perfectly framed, etc. For the delivered photographs, we of course spent a great deal of time selecting and editing the shots, but for the "moment" the small jpegs, unedited, worked fine at the reception. Just an idea!
By the way, my gift was in the form of a book and a disk of the edited shots.
Nice article. I just happen to be shooting my first wedding (also for a friend) in a few hours time. Luckily I have my wife as an assistant which help being in more than one place. Weather forecast looks like heavy rain all day so the planned photos on a nearby farm will likely not happen and be moved to an old building just down the road.
All your points seem valid in my research I have done too.
Seems like you did a good job. Well done.
weddings are so stressful as the main photographer!! being the second shooter isn't nearly as bad, but they pay great money when you can get in contact with the correct client. Congrats on making it through your first wedding though! btw you did a very nice job on the blog, all the points are very true and photographers who have never shot a wedding really need to read you post!
Thanks for the insights - it pretty much matches what I found during my first (and only, so far) shooting of a Wedding last August. They are good friends and I had asked them if they had someone taking photos - if not that I would like to do it, clearly saying that it was my first time and that the shots would be my wedding gift. If they wanted to be on the safe side, they should hire a pro, though. They didn't want to hire someone else, and they really liked the resulting shots and the photo book I put together.
I had rented two 2.8 glasses to cover 24 to 200 mm and used my and my son's body. It definitely was good to have two bodies, that eleminated the need to change glasses. I did run short on storage space, but had a laptop to download the pictures in between. (That seemed to take ages!).
Overall a very nice experience, but I would nevertheless still not really want to do it as a paid job, not being sure if I could meet the expectations under all circumstances. I would like to get some more practice as a second shooter, so far no one has approached me, though.
I've done my one wedding as the only photog from 10:00am to 2:00am (16 hours).... It went very well, but that's enough for me. Kudos to wedding photogs!
