Wedding belles and beaus at Venture Photography Workshops
A show of hands – how many of you have been asked by friends and family to photograph their wedding because (a) you have a “good camera” and (b) you take great photos?
Another show of hands – how many of you have said “Yes” to then photograph their wedding?
It’s a growing trend for casual and amateur photographers to be asked to photograph weddings for people they know. It’s a challenge and a great proving ground for any photographer aiming to take his or her craft more seriously. But the prospect of shooting a wedding often leads to anxiety and stress, often driven by the photographer’s fear of “stuffing up” the shoot. After all, you only get one chance at a wedding — you can’t exactly ask the bride and groom to repeat their vows if you happen to muck up the exposure.
Our Wedding Photography Essentials workshop on Sunday aimed to demystify the process of wedding photography for photographers keen on making in roads into the industry, and to help them manage time, client expectations and the actual wedding day shoot. And the answer to successful wedding photography? Planning, planning and more planning. Plan and prepare so that there are no surprises during the day that can jeopardise your documentation of the couple’s happy day. The wedding day, as instructor Greg Perry says, is the final performance; you should have rehearsed everything by the wedding day, so that photographing a wedding is 90% going through the motions.
After going through key areas of wedding photography preparation, from the initial meeting with the couple, to using contracts, managing customer expectations, pre-wedding shoots and shot lists for the day, we headed out into Freo’s Kings Square to shoot a mock wedding, starring our wedding models, Yvette and Shane. This was a great opportunity to look at the more technical and artistic aspects of wedding photography — from the best exposure modes to use, when to use exposure compensation and use of fill flash, to creative ways of posing the couple and the best angles to get the “must have” wedding shots.
We’re planning on running another wedding photography workshop in August. Keep an eye on the website for details, or contact us to be informed when the workshop becomes available for bookings.
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