Today I just got my first response from my website (from someone I don't know). Thing is, they asked me to do a wedding, which I've never done. Like you guys have told people to do time and time again, I declined, but booked myself as their tenative second shooter for whoever they happen to choose.
But the wedding is in April, and I would love to get more weddings under my belt, if possible.
Are there any DPCers in the Los Angeles area that have weddings coming up, and if so, would you mind if I tagged along?
Just a quick note. The primary shooter should ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS chose the second shooter. There should NEVER be a second shooter, or photographer hired by the bride and groom. There are many reasons for this that I wont get into, but if you think about it I'm sure most of them will come to you. Finding someone that will hire, mentor, whatever you to be there second shooter is the correct way to do it. I can assure you if the Bride and groom hire a photographer, and he/she finds out they hired a second shooter there will be problems for all involved.
You can go to digitalweddingforum.com and sign up as a starter photographer. There is a place in their classifieds section where you can list yourself as available for second shooter (or what they call "tag-a-long".) You can also browse that section for those looking for a shooter in your area.
Aside from that, there are also some very informative threads and information to be found there. For some reason, the site wouldn't come up for me tonight, so they may be experiencing some problems.
I can also highly recommend DigitalWeddingForum (aka DWF), which is a great resource & community for professional wedding photographers, definitely worth the membership fee. chiqui (my wife) got some great help from there when setting up her wedding photog biz a few years ago, and there are many photogs willing to mentor (from my/our experience anyway).
EDIT: appears that their server is offline at the moment, should be back up again soon
Join your local PPA org, get involved, meet the other members so they know who you are, and then ask to second shoot or assist. You may start out working for free until you can prove that you can produce images of saleable quality.
