A Day As A Wedding Photographer

A couple weeks ago I had the chance to job shadow a pair of award winning wedding photo journalists for a day. As most of you know I’ve only started learning photography earlier this summer, so I was really excited about this opportunity to gain some insights on wedding photography.

The day before the job, I decided to pick up a Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 OS. I know the kit lens (18-55mm) that I’ve been using isn’t going to be able to capture parts of the ceremony unless I get pretty close up. With the bigger tele I was able to hang out off to the side and in the back to take pictures and avoid getting into the “real” photographers way.

A typical wedding day for a Chinese wedding is about 12 hours. This 12 hours doesn’t seem as long as I thought because every minute there seems to be something happening (just like my own wedding). At times I was really caught up with the excitement and almost forgot I was there to take pictures! My friends didn’t give me too much advice except to know when to move out of the way when they are using a wide angle lens (we don’t want to be part of the picture). So I spent the 12 hours trying my best to capture what I thought the wedding couple would like to see of their wedding day.

The first hour or so, when the bride was getting ready and the grooms party arrive to pick her up, most of my shots seems very portrait style. I didn’t know how to compose the image so most of it was vertical and the subject is taken with shoulder and up type of shot. Later on, I was able to work more composition into the photos and they began to look better. Still I find that I tend to just take the photo from where I’m standing.

During the ceremony is probably the most hectic times of the day. When we arrived at the church, I was told to “survive on your own”! I was pretty clueless but did managed to get some interesting shots during the ceremony. It felt weird running up and down the aisles. I felt like I was distracting the guests from the ceremony even thought I was trying to move around with as little noise as possible. Also the couple have 2-3 friends who were using video recorders to tape the entire ceremony. While I try to avoid getting in the way, I’m still pretty sure there are numerous scenes where they will see 3 people wearing all black running up and down the aisles.

After the ceremony I was more relaxed and actually had fun shooting the outdoor portraits with the couple. Before dinner starts, I also got to test a macro lens used for shooting the wedding rings and the wedding favors. Just before the dinner starts however, my battery decided to take a break. I don’t have spare batteries but thank god I decided to bring my charger. So after the cake cutting photos, I recharged my battery for about 15-20 minutes and managed to take photos of the toasting and a couple of wedding games.

It was a very exciting day and I’ve learned a lot of new things about photography, my equipment and post processing. Due to the new lens’ weight, I was not use to handling it and there were some blurry images created by hand shaking, especially when I use max tele. I also didn’t adjust my focusing since I use auto focus and at times, it didn’t focus on the right spot so the people standing off to the sides were out of focus. Lastly, I have a long way to go to learn about photo compositions! Hopefully I will have more opportunity to improve my photography in the near future.

**I’ve decided not to post any photos of the couple and her family and friends as they are not official photographs. **