My first wedding is completed and now I’m just waiting on the case to arrive to deliver! I would have ordered this sooner but we had a minor glitch, no big deal. The photos have been placed on my site (here) so they are available for viewing by friends and family of the lovely couple until the case is in.
My second shooter truley was amazing! I didn’t have to direct him or tell him what to do. He showed up, took what I handed him, then added in with ideas of his own! We really had a great time getting through all the commotion that comes with weddings and hanging out with everyone (in our own way).
The couple was great to work with, just as laid back and relaxed as I think a couple can be! The wedding party and family were the same. I had no problems organizing everyone for the “posed” shots. We of course had the normal glitches, missing socks, not ready, missing people…but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle. We started with what we could and the others showed up as soon as they were able so we could keep moving through shots and keep everything calm and collected.
Due to the minor missing people and items we didn’t have as much time with the bride and groom as I would have hoped so we took them back out separately while everyone was taking down the ceremony to complete the transformation to reception. This turned out to be an excellent idea and time to steal the couple (thank you so much Luke!) as we were able to get some great shots with them alone.
I definitely learned many things during this wedding, thankfully I thought of most of them before hand and was ready, but they are some great rules to live by.
Wedding Photography Rules to Live By:
- Have a second shooter you trust and work well with. Trusting Luke and his photography skill (more than he does himself I think) allowed me the freedom to do what I needed while knowing that some of the random “fun” shots would be taken.
- Prepare for the “what can go wrong will go wrong” scenario. The bride will show up hungry without food, and have a food allergy. Thankfully other than crackers I had beef jerky as well so she was able to get a little in her tummy so we could keep going. This helped with any further delays and kept everyone happy. Beef jerky, though $6/bag, is still a small price to pay. People were late and
we had missing items, no worries, get what you can and keep moving. The more you get now the less time it will take later. - Set all cameras to the same time! This one I forgot and it make the first round of processing miserable. It would have been much faster to fly through all ceremony together, then reception, etc. However, having the times off meant that there were groups of photos all over. I had no choice but to remove any really bad shots, then go through and tag and keyword every image so I could group them back up. In the end it wasn’t that bad, but it would have been much easier had they been synced to start with.
- Have your shot list and look over it many times prior. I did and I did! This helped so I didn’t have to pause and refer to it all the time. I was able to tell them what was coming next so they were ready to go. Due to the short time we were able to get through many photos still!
- Breath! They hired you for a reason, don’t stress that reason. Work is work and the photography vision is what you do. Anyone that hired you and trys to make you change your style should have hired someone else. They reviewed your portfolio, and liked what they saw, this should come natural and be your normal artistic touch. The more you stress, the worse it gets…so breath.
- Last but not least….Have fun and let them have fun!
