Rants and Chants

This weekend I attended a cousin’s wedding and, as our gift to the couple, Lila and I offered to do the photography. Along the way to our getting married, Lila and I had been very particular about what we wanted in our wedding photography and we had often talked about what it would be like to do wedding photography as a profession. Here’s what we learned this weekend …

It requires at least two cameras. We quickly discovered that having to swap lenses and change film in one camera body was our biggest technical obstacle. Had my cousin asked for a mix of black-and-white, color, and/or infrared, we would have had to make some hard choices about when to shoot each type of roll and would have missed getting some good color shots whenever the camera had black-and-white, or vice versa. Even if digital photography makes this easier, I can still see where two cameras would make it faster than switching lenses.

It takes two people. While we didn’t have two cameras, thankfully we had two photographers, myself and Lila. I think we worked extremely well together. Our skills complemented one another perfectly. Lila is the people person and did a great job arranging people and giving them directions. She also has an extremely good eye for details. I am a camera whiz and know things that Lila still needs to learn about controlling exposure, depth of field, and some of the tricks, like capturing a balance of blurred motion and recognizable faces on people dancing. While I am generally good at overall composition and I do note a lot of details, Lila’s detail skills filled in some things that I had overlooked.

Would I do this again? Yeah, I might, especially if I had a second camera and if Lila and I worked as a team. The only drawback I could ever see would be having to work weekends, which would be hard if we had children.