Well, it happened. Way back when I picked up this hobby, I swore I'd never shoot a wedding. Event photography, especially one as important as a wedding, was one area that I swore to avoid like the plague. But, I ended up shooting my first "real" wedding last Saturday.
I've been asked by friends to shoot other events in the past year. It's for friends who don't have the money to hire a "real" photographer, so I agreed. I did two memorial services, and my sister-in-law's wedding to her 2nd husband. But that was an informal living room, family only wedding. No real big deal, no real expectation. Then about a month ago (maybe a bit longer) very close family friends, whom I consider family, asked me to shoot their daughter's wedding. I turned them down at first, but then started feeling bad about it. I talked to them again, and basically the deal was that either I shoot it, or they do it with their p&s cameras, and I couldn't deal with that, so I changed my mind.
Every time someone tried calling me a photographer, I'd correct them and say, "no, no photographer, just a guy with a camera". I was super nervous at first, but attending the rehearsal helped a lot, and shooting on the day of the wedding wasn't all bad, but it wasn't w/o some snags either. First, we were dong posed family shots before the ceremony, and I brought my light stands, umbrellas, and my gadget infinity "poverty wizards", and one of them wouldn't fire if I got more than 2 ft. away from it. Not good. So, a call home and I had my fater-in-law rush down my SB-26 (w/ built in optical slave) to fill in. It worked pretty reliably, but I had a few failed shots until I realized the problem. Guest's were still shooting w/ their p&s cameras, and their flashes would trigger my SB-26, so it wasn't ready for me when I took the shot. A little communication resolved that problem.
The ceremony went off well enough, I shoot it w/ my F56AM flash on top of the camera and bounced it off the ceiling for most shots, with satisfactory results. After the day of swapping AA batteries, I can see why it's imperative to have a nice set of external battery packs if you do events like this regularly. That, and good radio triggers...
I'm still developing the raw files so maybe I'll post a few in a couple of days when I get them done.
So, in the morning before the wedding I hurt my back palying w/ my kids (stupid age), so by the end of the day (7hrs of shooting) I walked away, kind of bent over since I couldn't stand up straight, w/ a bag full of dead batteries and 375 pictures on my card...
So far I've got about 330 keepers after tossing out the dark frames, blurry shots, and test shots. I'm still paring it down though, maybe closer to the 315 mark once I'm done scrutinizing all the shots.
So, what's a normal number of pictures from a professional wedding photographer anyway?
All in all- it wasn't as bad of an experience as I thought it'd be...but I'm not anxious to do it again...
BM
ps. special thanks to the strobist blog and planetneil.com...excellent resources w/o which this would have been a miserable experience.