The Reluctant Wedding Photographer

Weddings are not my natural habitat, photography-wise. I’m usually to be found perched on a rock on some windswept strand taking long-exposures of breaking waves or sitting contentedly for ages on a mountain-side waiting for the light to change. All a world away from the frenetic activity of a wedding. My view is that weddings are best left to the professionals. They do it week in and week out and know how best to produce a series of memorable images. A good professional will have developed a unique style, something that sets him/her apart from run-of-the-mill photographers, and that is something that can only be achieved by constant practice. I'm thinking here of photographers like Roger Overall in Cork and Shane O'Neill in Waterford, to mention just two. Prospective brides and grooms should therefore check around and find whose style they like best. Just because someone is good at, say, landscape photography does not necessarily mean that he/she will be able to do weddings well.

It  was therefore with a sense of reluctance and not a little foreboding that I agreed to photograph a couple of weddings within weeks of each other in the last few months. Both were for family friends who were adamant that despite all my caveats and entreaties they wanted me to take on the job. I have photographed weddings before so it wasn’t as if I was a first-timer. Most of the weddings I’ve shot were in the pre-digital era when you were confined to maybe 6 rolls of medium format film and you had to make sure that practically every shot was properly composed and exposed. Digital wedding photography is a breeze by comparison.

The first of the weddings was in Spain. I had to make sure that all the vital equipment I needed was going to fit in a take-on bag – I was not about to trust expensive gear to checked-in luggage. Happily, my LowePro Photo Trekker Classic met the Aer Lingus baggage requirements – I called to the airport to make sure a week before I flew out - and it carried a Canon 5D Mk11, a Canon 5D, and a Canon 400D. The lenses I brought were the Canon 24-105, the Canon 17-40, the Sigma 70-200 and the Canon 15mm. (The 24-105 was used for most of the shots). I also brought two Canon 580 EX 11s plus a Gary Fong Lightsphere. In the checked-in luggage I included a Lastolite white reflector as well as some odds and ends such as flash batteries. If the luggage went missing I could either do without the missing items (the reflector) or buy replacements (batteries) locally.

 I made sure to call to the different wedding locations a couple of times before the event: the hotel where the bride would be getting ready and where the reception would be held, and the church where the ceremony would take place. Obviously, I needed to be confident of being able to find them on my own on the day.  I also needed, of course, to check out the light and note the likely exposure settings I’d be using as well as determining which locations would be best for group and individual shots. And as I visited the church I uttered a silent prayer that the wedding day weather would be dry and overcast and not, please God, wet or too sunny.

All went well (and God answered this agnostic’s prayer by producing a dry, warm overcast day with only occasional bouts of bright sunshine). I accompanied the bride and her party to the hotel and photographed them being made up and getting their hair done. Then it was a quick dash back to where the lads were staying for some shots of them on the beach. This was done pretty sharpish as I had to return the 10 miles to the hotel for the final shots of the bride and her party as they were about to depart for the ceremony.

Then it was on the church to capture the arrival of the bride and the usual photos outside the church door before changing cameras for the internal shots. I went from ISO 100 and natural light to ISO 1600 and flash. Some photographers refuse to use flash for weddings preferring instead to crank up the ISO to the max. I’m not one of them. The light here was abysmal and I wasn’t going to trust in ISO alone to give me usable images. Even at ISO 1600 I was using a setting of 1/60 at f/4. And it worked very well indeed.

After the ceremony it was back outside to natural light and making sure to change the ISO settings accordingly. Weddings are a combination of remembering a host of different technical things (ISO, when to switch from Manual to Aperture Priority to Shutter Priority, flash settings, etc) as well as checking if the various “must-have” shots have been captured. Doing this on one’s own is not easy, at least not for someone who is not doing it regularly. An assistant would have been very useful.

And always there is a voice at the back of your mind saying: “listen, if you screw this up, this once in a lifetime event, this unrepeatable day, you will have to live with the disappointment of the couple and their families for the rest of your life”. As they say, no pressure.

I finished shooting at about 1am. I had been photographing from about 10:30am the previous day. In sequence: bride’s/bridesmaid’s make-up and preparation; groom’s/groomsmen’s pre-church shots; bride’s departure from hotel; bride’s arrival at church; ceremony; post-cermony shots at church; arrival at hotel; group shots; shots of B&G on their own; arrival at reception; speeches; cutting of cake (usually staged before the actual cutting of the cake but not possible in this instance); more individual shots of B&G in low light; B&G arriving for first dance; photos of guests dancing and having a good time; photos of bride and/or groom with particular friends/relations.

The Irish wedding schedule was: arrival at bride’s parents’ home at 11:30am for make-up, preparation and photos with parents, siblings and bridesmaids; groom/groomsmen outside church; bride’s arrival at church; ceremony; post-ceremony shots – including family groups - at church; to Blarney Castle for individual shots of the B&G; arrival at hotel; cutting of the cake (staged); more individual shots of the couple; speeches; first dance; photos of guests dancing and having a good time. I put my cameras away around 12:30am. I should add that my wife and myself were guests at both weddings so there was no question of packing up and going home as soon as the first dance was over as would be the norm with most wedding photographers.

I took a *lot* of photos. I am not a “spray and pray” merchant and I tried to ensure that each frame was properly composed and exposed in camera. Still, the beauty of digital is that I could shoot six or more frames of a family group just in case someone blinked. The downside is that they all have all to be edited. Which is where the real hard work comes in.

I was faced with days of post-processing in Photoshop CS5, of poring over individual images checking for things not noticed during the shooting: the odd tree branch growing out of someone’s head, the “toilet” sign that had to be cloned out, and the like. Then there was the colour correction and noise reduction to be done, the contrast to be tweaked and the levels to be adjusted, the conversion of selected images to black&white, appying vignettes and Gaussian blur to particular shots, and so forth. Naturally, I shot in RAW so each usable image had to be converted to jpeg. And yes, I know about Photoshop Actions and I’m sure professional wedding photographers use them to speed up the workflow but that is something that they refine after years of experience. I felt I had no choice but to do it the hard way.

Then there was the album preparation.  I explained to each bride and groom that I would determine which photographs would be used in the album but would give them the power of veto over any particular image they did not like. (I only had to make one very minor change in each instance). I do not subscribe to the philosophy of letting the B&G decide on which ones will feature in the album. As far as I was concerned, they selected me, for better or worse, to produce a record of the day and to present the finished product based on my experience and, for want of a better phrase, on my aesthetic sensibility. They would have to trust me and they had no hesitation in doing so.

A lot of work went in to the album design. The selection of images, resizing individual ones to match the particular page templates, deciding on which ones to include and exclude – this took me about a  week in each case. I’m sure that I could have done it in a long day or so but I found that I could only manage a couple of hours per session . With all due respect to the lovely people concerned there was only so much time I could spend staring at them, their relatives and friends on screen.

Then there was the slideshow which is pretty well expected as part of the package nowadays. I loaded as many images as possible on to the slideshow – it’s an ideal vehicle for including all those shots that didn’t make it to the album. I used ProShow Producer from Photodex and I burned the final versions to DVD. I chose the soundtrack myself – lesser known modern instrumental music to complement the images but not songs as I felt they would distract.

The couples concerned were delighted with the end results – the albums and the slideshows -  and I was very pleased with how things turned out myself. At some point in the distant future someone will look at the end album page and see “photography by John Finn” and maybe wonder who I was. There is a sense of gratification in that, in capturing one of the most important events in a couple's life, in making something that will outlive us.

But I won’t be touting for wedding business. There’s just too much pressure on the day, too many opportunities for something to go wrong, and the workload afterwards is something that I had seriously underestimated when I agreed to take on the jobs. I think you need to love weddings to do them on a regular basis, to constantly find new ways of making fresh and exciting images, to avoid the worn out old clichés, to retain the love of photography and not let it become a chore, a mere means of making some cash.

And I don’t even like weddings.