The Wedding Shoot

A couple of weeks ago tonight, I was hard at work photographing a friend's wedding. I mentioned this in an earlier post, and it has finally come and gone. I'm thankful. Here are my reflections:

1. It wasn't truly my first wedding. I shot another wedding about 18 years ago. It was also for someone I  worked with at the time, but was held at a dude ranch and had a very non-traditional format. Guests sat on hay bales and the altar was the porch of a dog-run cabin. I shot the entire wedding on 35mm film using my Nikon FM-2 and a cheap, aftermarket flash. All my efforts ended up as for naught, as the couple has been divorced now for quite a few years. Also, what the friend paid me to shoot the wedding I spent on processing and gave it back to him as a wedding gift. Net proceeds: less than zero. I kept none of the images from that wedding, and I now regret it.
2. This wedding was a shakedown cruise for my rig, as I had never used it in this high-demand capacity. I have two flashes, a Stroboframe flash bracket and a bagful of rechargable NiMH batteries. I thought I was set.
3. I learned that the biggest demand on a wedding shooter is flash power. Powering my flash with NiMH meant that I was always changing batteries. In some situations, I was overdriving my flash to compensate for longer shots, creating more demand on my NiMHs. At the reception, I found a convenient place to plug in my 15-minute charger and I visited it frequently.
4. Experience is indeed the best teacher for the wedding photographer. I'll be prepared to do a better job on my next wedding (assuming there is one) than I did on this one, and so on and so on...
5. Autofocus was my worst enemy. I am still learning the intricacies of autofocus on a high-tech digital SLR, so I made a few mistakes, thankfully none terribly serious. Most common: when taking a picture of two people standing together, make sure the focal point is not the background between them. Amongst my table shots, I took a couple of  pix with a perfectly focused background and two fuzzy people in the fore.
6. Be ready for a marathon. I arrived at the church at 4pm and left the reception at close to 11pm. For virtually the whole time, I was carrying my rig, which had become an awful burden by the evening's end.
   
7. Don't be afraid to be creative. Some of my favorite shots involved spur-of-the-moment ideas I had.
   
8. Don't be afraid to get in the way. My presence as the wedding photographer was fairly important, so I got over the notion that I would bother someone or get in someone's way. "Excuse me. Excuse me..."
9. Out of around 450 exposures, I culled out around 100, turning over around 350 to the couple. Out of that 350, there were a few that I didn't much like, but felt they were important and left them in.
   
10. My friend and his wife are very understanding about the challenges I experienced. Thankfully, I don't think their expectations are super high, otherwise they would have hired someone else. Hopefully, they will be happy with the results. I'll at least give them a good price to pay for the experience, which was good.