Q-108: A Wedding's Worth

Most photographers have to decide at one point or another-- is a wedding worth it?
It's a trade off really, especially for your first.

You've been a semi-amateur/hopeful-pro photographer for about 3 minutes (ok, a year) and you've finally started to get the hang of photographing people. Granted, most of your really good shots are purely accidental and you don't even realize you got them until you're in editing... but still. Good stuff. Accidental, but good.

But when S. initiates a text conversation about shooting a wedding for a friend you're interested. After all, a day of work, some editing and some quick money right? And you could certainly use a boost financially, even a small one-- not to mention the potential to add something really impressive to your portfolio.

So you go back and forth via S. via text to the bride M. And it's settled. Since it's the first wedding you've shot you'll do it for $150, no limits on number of photos. The bride will get a CD with all the usable shots (be it 50 or 500), and then if she wants any printed, she'll pay cost for the printing. All in all not a bad deal-- you probably could have charged more, but then you'd have the added pressure of delivering to the price. At $150 if you totally screw it up, you'll feel a lot LESS guilty about it... at least in theory.

You spend 3 weeks getting more and more nervous, wishing you had more money to spend so you could get more supplies for the wedding-- including a separate flash unit, but you can only do what you can do. You start to think you've made a mistake about a week and a half before the wedding. You're not experienced enough, you're not good enough, you're not talented enough. You don't know enough to shoot a wedding. All of your doubts run through your mind late at night and you wish you'd just said no. What if you only get 5 good shots? Then what?

But it's too late to cancel now, and a week away from the event you try to calm yourself.... lot's of "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and goshdarnit people like me..." and other warm inspirational fuzzies.

Saturday comes and you rush to get ready and to the hotel on time. You meet up with S and finally meet the bride and groom for the first time. Once you take a good look at the wedding party, and the venue, you wish you'd had the time to go out and buy that flash unit. "Romantic" lighting is great, if you have the flash power to define the family below the arch on the far side of the room. You play with distance, angle, flash, flash diffuser and lighting, and finally get the lay of the land. You take test shots and adjust. By the time things get rolling, you're as ready as you'll ever be.

The preparation shoot is fine, lots of pictures of the setup and decorations,

and of the bride getting ready.


And then it's on to the actual ceremony. This is where things start to get a little... interesting. You've been warned to be ready for the unexpected and you tried but really, what can a novice do? Looking back now there's a list of things you wish you'd done before starting.

Like buy an external flash unit for example. Or that cross-hairs filter that you've thought about, the things that would have done to the Bride's tiara? :sigh: You can only dream. And buy one for the next wedding you shoot.

But there's more than that. Other issues to contend with that make not having an external flash so ridiculously unimportant. Like the second photographer. That's right, the second photographer. The one that wasn't hired. The one that insisted on getting in your way. The good news is that when the Priest asks for the audience to cease taking photos, he sits down. You don't. You move across the room, getting pictures he won't be getting.





The other problem, the bigger problem, everyone's problem-- is the videographer. From the bride you know that his video is beautiful! (aside from the streak of black and white that is you darting back and forth to get pictures-- oops) But unfortunately for you, and the audience, the videographer's light is blinding. He parks himself behind the priest, facing the audience, with his light on full blast. From the few times you perch in an actual audience-positioned chair, you're blinded. You joke with the bride later that she should show the video to the guests... a lot of them probably didn't actually see the wedding while they were there. And of course there is the moment when the rings are being exchanged and your only path to the shot is around the videographer-- who refuses to give you the space to get around for the shot. Which means the only shot you have of the rings being exchanged is the bride's ring at the very top of her finger.



You'll find the light from the videocamera much more inconvenient when it comes time to edit your shots. It means extra time fiddling with the lighting and contrast controls. In a lot of caes, it also means playing with more layeres and gradient fills than you normally would bother with JUST to get a final product that is well lit without being looking overly processed.



After the ceremony you're in luck! The second, un-paid photographer begins posing the wedding party for photos. For you, that's golden-- posing is NOT your strong suit-- you've always been more of a candid-is-ideal kind of photographer when it comes to people.





You step back and let him pose, but start to get annoyed again as he leaves you less and less time to get your shots. Even the Bride begins to be frustrated, since she's paying YOU, not him. A liason is selected to speak with him. He is reminded that YOU are the paid photographer, and he needs to leave you time after posing to take your shots, and NOT to move into your frames.

Eventually he is ... well, chased off, for lack of better terminology. Then it's just you and the videographer, and the truth is at that point his light is actually helpful-- particularly since he has finally turned it down a notch from blinding to just... reallybright!

You follow along behind as the videographer now choreographs the shots, setting up the cake cutting,



The first wine sip (or lemonade sip since the videographer can't be bothered to wait for the actual first sip)



And the first dance, which is where arguably the most tender of your photos are created.











And when all is said and done, you hop throughout the reception, grabbing snaps of greetings, hugs, well-wishes and well-wishers, and ignore the aching in your knees and back, and the rumbling in your stomach. This day is not about you.







A few more shots of the Bride and Groom after the excitement has died down,





And then it's time for you to leave. A late dinner with friends to celebrate the end of your very long day, and then you spend the next week and a half in editing.

You go to work as usual, putting your 8 or 8 and a half hours each day, and then rush home from dinner to your laptop. You start by weeding through 550 photos, cropping and resizing those that are editable, or that at least might be fixable. When you finish, you're left with 279 pictures. Of those, some probably still won't end up presentable to the bride, but you decide to give them a try anyway.

For 4 or 5 hours each night, and most of the day on the weekend, you clik and drag, edit and fill, play with gradients and contrast, light settings, color saturation, even brushes. When it's all said and done you have 297 photos to present to the bride. A small flourish and you add section headings so that when the CD is presented in slideshow form, there is a separation between the preparations, the ceremony, and the reception:







The addition of which brings your final total to 300 pictures. 50 hours of work and 300 photos. And you only charged how much?

Well, there's a first time for everything. Who would ever have imagined that your first time out of the gate you'd end up with 300 photographs? You catch a lot of community flack during your editing process, and after, about how cheaply you did this wedding (heck, people gave you a hard time about it before you even started!). You keep reminding people it was your first, that you were concerned about being able to prsent even 50 good photos when it was done, that most of your work with people as subjects has been hit and miss-- at best!

And now that it's over you've learned quite a bit. Not just about the process, but about yourself. You know now that in a pinch, you can come up with quantity to match the big boys (and girls). You konw that with the right equipment (and even sometimes without it) you can create something that is truly beautiful enough to rival what the pros do. Maybe not consistently yet... but someday that consistent quality will come too.

And you know that you were right. And for the first time really, it resonates with you: you can do this. You SHOULD be doing this. Technique will come in time, and you'll learn more with each event you work, each photo you take, each piece of equipment you add to your arsenal. But for the moment, now that your first is all said and done, now that the CD has been handed over to the Bride, now that business cards are being handed out, now that people are starting to see what you can do, for now you revel in the recognition that you have found something you are truly meant to be doing.

And when people ask you if you think it was worth it... if you think it was worth doing 50 hours of work for $150 on a wedding for people you'd never met before-- all you can say is...







I do.