Every Wedding is a Learning Experience!
Image provided by Unsplash
Those people who are closest to me will have heard me say many times that I am a strong believer in life long learning - and it’s true. Whilst I cannot claim to be a true disciple of Stephen Covey and necessarily believe that we should set aside time every day for learning, I do maintain that as a wedding photographer I need to take stock after each wedding commission and assess what went well and what went badly. In the spirit of openness and collaboration, I will share some experiences and lessons learned.
I recently shot an outdoor wedding in an idyllic setting in the Cotswolds. Having placed my cameras and spare lenses in an open camera bag on a table on the lawn, I volunteered to help the wedding coordinator shift some concrete urns into a better position for the ceremony. On returning to my gear, I lifted the bag without securing the top and subsequently dropped my expensive 85mm f1.4 lens on the gravel path causing a big scratch on the front of the lens glass - ouch! Very expensive mistake! Lesson #1 - take care of your kit, it’s how you earn a living!
After 6 hours on my feet at an outdoor wedding, in temperatures of 38 degrees, I sat down for a break whilst the wedding guests were having their meal in anticipation of the wedding coordinator telling me when/where I would be fed. Imagine my surprise when I was told that the couple had not made arrangements to feed me. To make matters worse, I was told that the DJ (who was booked to entertain the guests for just 3 hours) had been catered for and was enjoying Beef Wellington behind the scenes. In the end I had to drive a round trip of 30 mins to a local village to get a sandwich and a bag of crisps, before joining the guests for another 3 hours of work. Lesson #2 - make sure your wedding contract explains that you want feeding and check arrangements prior to the wedding day. If in doubt, take some food.
I was once hired to shoot just the evening session of a wedding with a ‘swap-out’ with the main photographer planned for early evening. Dreadful idea! Firstly, I hadn’t had a chance to build a rapport with the family and friends during the day and found quite a few guests to be confused (and rude) over why another photographer was pointing a camera at them. Secondly, the wedding was running very late so the main photographer was still ‘on site’ adding further to the confusion for the guests. Lastly, many of the guests were ‘very merry’ by the time I started shooting candid shots of the dance floor fun with glasses being dropped at a rate of 1 every 5 minutes - virtually impossible to stand-up in 2 or 3 inches of spilled beer and wine! Lesson #3 - don’t accept requests for ‘evening function only’ shoots - my fault not theirs!
Very recently, I had my first experience of a GDPR problem after being told by the Bride that there was a member of their family who did not want his photograph taken. Worse still, this person was not pointed-out to me until after the guests started to arrive. As it happens it didn’t present too much of a problem because every time I raised my camera up to my eye, this person moved away or turned his back. Lesson #4 - be very familiar with your GDPR position as an event photographer and include a clause in your wedding contract.
According to my marketing philosophy of ‘promising much and then delivering more’, I recently shot some aerial footage with my drone at a wedding venue before the guests arrived - this was not part of the agreed services. The task was completed without any snags but I had consumed all of the ‘contingency hours’ ahead of the ‘Bridal Prep’ and then found myself rushing to get the key shots and missed some great candids. Lesson #5 - don’t stray off script just to impress your clients. Being versatile and adaptable is fine, but shooting yourself in the foot is not!