5 Wedding Photography Tips And Tricks

1. 5 Wedding Photography Tips And Tricks I am working as a full-time Wedding Photographer shooting around 30 to 40 weddings a year, which is a lot, it meant that just about every one of my weekends, I was shooting a wedding before COVID 19 and then I would edit those photos during a week and Deliver them to clients, do client meetings and our emails do admin and all of the different things that go into running a wedding, photography business. So you know that these tips are coming from a good place and someone who is working as a professional wedding photographer. I learned these along the journey and some of them I wish I knew when I started winning photography, so, let's jump into tip number one which is kind of a non tip and something that you shouldn't do and that is just get started or just jump into Wedding Photography and the reason being is that there's a lot of bad advice going around at the moment that I've seen online and on YouTube that you should just start shooting weddings if you haven't done it before because you'll gain a lot of experience. You'll be able to shoot products, you'll be able to shoot couples and portraits and you'll be able to do event photography all in one day. I think this is terrible advice, you're, risking or playing with one of the most important days in somebody's life in order to gain experience. So if you screw up, you could potentially ruin this person's day or ruin their memories, because they have no photos to remember it by another reason, this is so bad is that your name is on the line as a photographer in photography. Your name is your personal brand, so if you screw up or make a mistake, your own name is being dragged through the mud and there's no real way to recover from that. So, instead, if you want to get started with wedding photography or you want to gain more experience, I'd suggest asking another photographer if you could assist them on one of their weddings. Now, there's a difference between assisting and second shooting, and not many people know the difference between these two assisting means that you accompany the main photographer to a wedding that they're shooting and you carry their bags. You move they light stands, you arrange people and you run errands that they might need on the day where a second shooting means that you're, just as important as the main photographer or you're shooting something that the main photographer one shoot, because there are somewhere else at The venue no photographer can be in two different places at one time, so, for example, if the main photographer was shooting the bride getting ready and they needed someone to capture the groom getting ready because it was happening at the same time as a second photographer you'd. Do that so, if you've never shot a wedding before I'd recommend becoming an assistant, so contact a photographer that you admire and ask them if you'd be able to assist them at a wedding. Most of the time, they'll be happy to have you as an assistant if they don't already have someone but don't get discouraged if they say no because, in the end, you're going to want to ask a few different photographers in any case, because what I've seen happen Time and time again is that if one photographer assists another and they never assist anyone else, they sort of start to emulate that photographers style and don't develop a style of their own. So I'd suggest asking a few different photographers if you could assist at their wedding. That's where you get a different perspective from each photographer that you assist, you can see how they handle the wedding day, how they interact with the bride and the groom, how they manage people and how they choose. You can even see their creative style from how they see light, how they compose their shots, and a ton of other different tips that you'll learn from assisting multiple photographers and as a backup. The main photographer has someone to fall back on in the case. Something goes terribly wrong. I assisted at over 40 weddings before I shot my first one, which takes us onto our second tip, and that has backups of everything. You really need to invest in the gear that you need to shoot weddings and, if you can't afford it or rent wedding, photography, and photography, in general, can get very expensive and very quickly, especially if you have gas gear acquisition syndrome which just about every photographer has. But this is why I emphasize renting so often because you get to play with the gear that you've always wished, you'd like to use and shoot with, and you can see if you'd like it or not. So if you want to rent a 35-mile 1.4 lens, but you can't afford it just rent it out play with it for the day and see for the improved your photography if it didn't, then obviously it's locked meant for you and you can move on to your Next dream piece of gear for a wedding: I'd really recommend having a full range of focal length so that you have something for every situation. So you want something wide, something mid-range and something telephoto. I know a lot of photographers prefer shooting on prime lenses on a wedding day, something like a 50ml one-point-two lens and 85mm lens a 35 a 24, but the problem that I have with this - that I'm a very sort of run and gun style photographer. So I shoot very quickly and it makes it difficult for me to constantly change lenses if I want to adjust my focal length. So what I do is I shoot with zoom lenses. Instead, I don't usually need a very shallow depth of field for the way that I compose

2. my shots so having a 2.8 lens is perfect. For me, I absolutely love the 24 70th 2.8 lens. This is amazing for just about any situation. You have everything from my wire to a mid-range to a slightly telephoto lens, all built into one and you're able to capture just about everything you need on the day. With this one lens, however, I'd also recommend having something a lot more zoomed in or telephoto to really capture those candid moments. My absolute favorite lens of all time is the Canon 135 f/2 lens. It really allows you to isolate your subject and separate them from the background and really capture those candid moments that everybody wants to see and, as I said, you always need to have backups. Anything could go wrong on a wedding day and if you don't have a backup, there's nothing, you can do so along with my zoom lenses, I would always bring my Prime's with me just in case I've had one of my lenses accidentally kicked across the entire wedding Venue by one of the groomsmen, while he was dancing luckily, I had a backup and I was able to continue the wedding with that. So, if you're going to rent a second camera as well, anything could happen to your camera. There are so many intricate pieces to it that anything could go wrong and you don't want it to happen on a wedding day. Maybe your focus stops working. Maybe it won't turn on. Maybe you run out of battery and one camera is not working with the other. Is it's always good to have backups, and one final thing is that you need at least one speed light at a winning venue. I don't really like shooting with speed lights or artificial life at a wedding. I really like to capture the mood that it was originally set by the bride and groom they put a lot of effort into creating a mood at the wedding with the lighting. So when you come in there with you huge flashes and your speed light, you create something that wasn't intended by the bride and groom before we move on to the next tip. I just want to take a second to thank Squarespace for supporting this blog and sponsoring this week's article. Now, if you haven't heard about them before, I built my entire website on Squarespace, and it only took me a couple of minutes if you're a Wedding Photographer or someone wanting to get into wedding photography, I highly recommend setting up a Squarespace website. It makes it super easy for you to create a blog and upload images regularly or upload more images to your portfolio on a regular basis, especially if you're a wedding, photographer and you're taking tons of images every weekend, you're always going to want to update you failure As Squarespace makes this a dream to do it's super simple, you never have to touch a single line of code and they 24/7 support is incredible if you run into any issues. So if you want to start a free trial, you can visit this link and you can use offer code Sheldon a checkout to get 10 % off of your first order. So whether you need a domain name, a website or an online store, make your next move with Squarespace, but more on that later, because we need to get back to our toes. The next tip is to have a shot list, and I know you're immediately going to say that you don't want a shot list. You want to be creative on the day and you want to see how the light falls and you want to compose your shots and just be creative, but sometimes in the heat of the moment, especially on a wedding day. The pressure can get too much and you can go completely blank. You can forget what you're doing you could forget what shots you needed to get and you can forget how to pose your couple. This happens so often to photographers who are just getting into wedding photography. I'r not going to say that this is going to happen to you, but it definitely does happen and there's a simple fix for it. So if you do have some shots that you definitely need on the day, write them down on a piece of paper, put them in the Notes app on your phone or you can do what I always tell my new students to do is write it on a Sticky note or a piece of paper with some tape and stick it behind the screen on your camera. A lot of cameras these days have flip out, screens, or flip up screens. So just put that piece of paper behind there. The reason you want to do it. This way is that, if you're in the middle of shooting a couple, you don't want to stop the shoot and ask them to hold on for a second. I just want to look for some ideas on my phone or pull out. A piece of paper ends. Go through a shot list, you'll have it right behind your camera screen and no one will be any wiser, so you can continue shooting without skipping a beat. You should also ask your bride and groom for a list of group photos that they need before the wedding. This way it will make it go so much faster so that you have more time for the couple shoots on the wedding day. Often, what ends up having to do group photos is that people start pulling one another around and saying I want to photo with this person, and I want to put it with this person, and can we get a photo with these people and ends up wasting your time And drags on much longer than it should so have a list of group photos really will speed up their time and make you get the shots that you need. Sometimes the bridegroom will also have some photos that they definitely do want and that they don't want you to miss. For example, there might be a special engraving on the ring that they want you to get or a special section in the venue set up in remembrance of a past family member. This happens often, and you need to remember, to get these shots so having that written down will make it so much easier and, as I spoke about before, sometimes you're, why blank and you can forget how to pose your couple. So remember that your camera is a device just as it is your phone, so you can upload images to your camera prior to the

3. wedding day of images or ideas that you definitely want to get so if you're busy shooting - and you can't really visualize what you Wrote down on that piece of paper, you can upload images to your camera's memory card and just play them back on your camera screen to see ideas that you wanted to shoot or poses that you wanted on the wedding day. The next tip is to arrive early and do some location scouting, often on a wedding day, depending on how strict the bride and groom are. The schedule can go completely. Haywire and you'll have no time to do any location scouting. So it's important to arrive early and do location scouting on your own walk around the venue and visualize. Where would be best for certain types of photos where you'd shoot the rings? Where you do the couple shoots where you take photos of the dress where the group photos will be done, so you have this built up in the back of your mind. So, on the wedding day, you don't get put on the spot and surprised when you need to find a location in a few seconds. You'll have them in the back of your mind that you can refer to and say yes, I remember there was a great spot down here behind the venue where the Sun was going to shine through that you can do group photos, you can even go to the venue a few days before the wedding to scout it out in your own time so that there's no rush at all and no pressure at all. I often do this on destination weddings in a country that I've never been to before, because sometimes getting from the one venue to the next can be a bit of a struggle or on a route that I'm not familiar with. So it's important that I know where I'm going and what I'm doing on the wedding day. That brings us on to our final tip, which is know your tools. You probably think that you know your camera very well, but you don't want it to be a wedding day that determines whether or not you do when you're put into a high-pressure situation like a wedding day, you can realize very quickly that you don't know your camera As well as you thought you did, you need to be able to look at a scene and know in the back of your mind, what settings need to be adjusted to expose correctly for that scene, and you need to be able to change those settings very quickly. If you move into a different scene, for example, let's say you're shooting a bride and groom inside of the chapel and as they're walking out, they walk out to the bright sunlight and immediately. You have to change your settings. So you need to know how to expose for that dark scene and, as you come out, know exactly what you're going to change so that you can expose for the brighter scene outside. So there's a few different things you can do to improve the speed at which you take photos. You can give yourself a time limit either do this at home and set up a specific scene that you want to shoot and give yourself a time limit to everything. In that scene and a few different focal lengths so think about getting a wide shot, something tight and close up and then something more creative and give yourself one or two minutes to do this. You can do this with props, or you can do this on a separate photoshoot that isn't as reliant on time as a wedding is, for example, a portrait shoot with a friend gives yourself a time limit to capture them. I recently did this in the three photographers' challenge, which is on my blog, where three photographers shot the same model, and we only had three minutes each to capture it. So it really put pressure on us and helped us speed up the way that we shoot. Remember that we're all shooting on digital these days, so we have memory cards, we have room, we have space to waste. If you don't like the photos, in the end, you can delete them, but it's not in the old days when we only had a few shots to capture exactly what we needed and that's it so to wrap up. You need to assist another photographer, invest in the tools on the gear that you need, get a shot list from your bride and groom, or write your own arrive early or the day before to do some location, scouting, and learn your tools.