Lessons From Another Life

I used to be a wedding photographer and it was CRAZY.

My advice to anyone who gets asked to take photographs at a wedding: DON’T DO IT.

Leave it to the pros.

Weddings are crazy: Equipment fails. People fail. The weather fails.

Weddings are the ultimate pressure cooker for new photographers, and there are 200 billion ways things can go wrong.

But man… I learned a LOT.

When I first started learning photography, I got a big camera.

If you’re a guy with a big camera, and someone is getting married… sometimes they ask you to take their wedding photographs.

And of course, when that happened to me, I said, “SURE! I can do that.”

I had no idea what I was in for. Holy cow… it was the most difficult thing I’d ever done… but it was also fun.

Pretty soon, my wife and I had a wedding photography business and we were doing a wedding nearly every weekend, sometimes more than one.

It was hard work. Long hours. Dozens of hours in the editing room were common. (We shot a BUNCH of weddings before Lightroom even existed.)

We did it for a while before our son was born, and our priorities changed. We wanted to be home with him more - so we shut down the biz. It seems like a million years ago.

Now, though, I look back at those photos and realize that so much of it created the foundation of my photography, even today.

Weddings forced me to adjust to an untold amount of variables, and demanded the absolute best of my skills every time I photographed one.

I had to learn how to handle ISO settings, especially on those ancient cameras I used to use.

Shutter speeds needed to be constantly monitored, especially in churches. A slow-walking bridesmaid is perfect at 1/125th of a second, but the flower girl who’s sprinting down the aisle like the universe is ending needs a faster shutter! Or a flash. or both.

The aperture is important because taking a photograph of 50 people in rows won’t turn out well if you’re shooting wide-open.

I had to learn how my autofocus worked in endless situations. I also had to learn how to disable autofocus to take over control in a split second.

And anticipation, rhythm, and movement were everything. We had to read the room and be ready for what’s next.

We had to tell stories… all while each and every moment of the wedding would only happen once, and often for a fraction of a moment.

And emotion. Emotion is everything.

Weddings taught me so many things, and while I’m grateful I’ll never do another one, in some ways weddings made me improve more than anything else I’ve done.

What I learned is that putting myself into new and interesting situations is important for my continued growth as a photographer.

I’m 51 but will never, ever even come close to “mastering” photography… and that’s fantastic.

I want to keep chasing, putting myself into new situations, and learning as I go.

Photo Credit: The amazing and awesome Casey Kurz.

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DEATH TO THE ROBOTS.

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