Recently I mentioned that I was asked to shoot a wedding for a friend and that I planned to use this as learning experience for shooting events. Wow. I want to go on the record right now and pay my deepest respects to wedding and event photographers. It is incredibly stressful and tiring. It is a non-stop affair, no sitting down, no eating, no drinking, NOTHING.
Here are some of the things that I learned that others might benefit from.
- Visit the location BEFORE the event. You need to get the lay of the land. In my case there were several obstacles that I would have loved to know about. One example is that the location had really tall ceilings. This made bouncing the flash off the ceiling useless. Also, the buffet area was next to the happy couple and it was sending out some bright fluorescent light that made it hard to expose correctly without blowing the background.
- Indoor wedding are almost never bright enough. Take your fastest lenses.
- If any videography is going on, talk to the person and develop a plan to not get in each other’s way. No reason why both of you should have your shots ruined.
- Take some test shots to see what sort of exposure settings you’ll need. With this in mind, you’ll be able to make changes faster if the need arises.
- Take a backup of everything. You don’t want gear failure to ruin the whole shoot.
- Know your camera in and out.
- Do not bring gear you are unfamiliar with. This is not a time to experiment.
- Shoot RAW. You’ll need as much flexibility as possible to fix any errors in post processing.
These are just a few. If you really are considering weddings, then I suggest you work for free as an assistant with another experienced photographer so you can get some experience under your belt.
