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Being a Wedding Photographer
Aug. 29th, 2009 10:36 amOkay, so last weekend actually went fairly well. But I'm not sure I want to be a wedding photographer again for a while. Especially not for a couple of friends. Not that the friends weren't wonderful and supportive; they were. It's just that that's a lot of pressure to make sure you get great photos!
They say it's about the photographer, not the equipment, but I found my main problem was that my gear was too underpowered for shooting a ceremony in a dark barn. Lacking the 5D mark II and L-series lens brought along by one of the guests from the States, damn it, I had to fall back on flash, my fixed 50mm lens and relatively high ISO for the ceremony. So the photos of the ceremony itself aren't spectacular, especially as I've only used the flash once before, and I'm more used to taking many shots in quick succession than you're able to do with when you've got to wait for the thing to recharge.
On the plus side, some of the group shots were nice, and the Maid of Honour did a spectacular job of herding everyone around, and I managed to get up onto a nice high wall and get a couple of good "everyone" group shots from above, which seemed to work.
And on the even plusser side, I just kept wandering around with my camera through the whole day, stealing shots here and there, and some of them are pretty fine. So I think they'll have a well-balanced set of memories to take away once I do the processing, which is going to take up a chunk of this weekend.
One thing I regret is not getting a few more shots of the bride and groom before the groom got caught by a group of children and had his face painted, but that's not the kind of thing I could have predicted, especially as I didn't know there were face-paints there!
But anyway. I survived. And it was fun.
This weekend I'm going to mix some proper not-doing-much time, like this morning, with some decorating (finally putting the wallpaper up in the lounge, I think) and some general chores like tidying the rest of the flat. Nothing too demanding, hopefully. I'm also going to go get some running shoes at a shop that does gait analysis -- for those not following my running blog, I'm doing okay, but now I'm up to running a mile and a half my feet are getting fairly sore, so I think I need to go beg some shoe advice from someone who knows what they're doing...
They say it's about the photographer, not the equipment, but I found my main problem was that my gear was too underpowered for shooting a ceremony in a dark barn. Lacking the 5D mark II and L-series lens brought along by one of the guests from the States, damn it, I had to fall back on flash, my fixed 50mm lens and relatively high ISO for the ceremony. So the photos of the ceremony itself aren't spectacular, especially as I've only used the flash once before, and I'm more used to taking many shots in quick succession than you're able to do with when you've got to wait for the thing to recharge.
On the plus side, some of the group shots were nice, and the Maid of Honour did a spectacular job of herding everyone around, and I managed to get up onto a nice high wall and get a couple of good "everyone" group shots from above, which seemed to work.
And on the even plusser side, I just kept wandering around with my camera through the whole day, stealing shots here and there, and some of them are pretty fine. So I think they'll have a well-balanced set of memories to take away once I do the processing, which is going to take up a chunk of this weekend.
One thing I regret is not getting a few more shots of the bride and groom before the groom got caught by a group of children and had his face painted, but that's not the kind of thing I could have predicted, especially as I didn't know there were face-paints there!
But anyway. I survived. And it was fun.
This weekend I'm going to mix some proper not-doing-much time, like this morning, with some decorating (finally putting the wallpaper up in the lounge, I think) and some general chores like tidying the rest of the flat. Nothing too demanding, hopefully. I'm also going to go get some running shoes at a shop that does gait analysis -- for those not following my running blog, I'm doing okay, but now I'm up to running a mile and a half my feet are getting fairly sore, so I think I need to go beg some shoe advice from someone who knows what they're doing...
