Wedding Photography is not so Simple?
Many times people think a wedding photographers simply shows up at a location, shoot for a couple hours, burn a disk and the jobs done. No matter how big or small the event is this is some of what’s involved.
The day before every wedding I spend a lot of time getting prepared. I always start by charging batteries, which is a process that takes most of the day. Then I go through all my gear cleaning, testing, syncing camera times and formatting cards. I pack up all my gear. I also review timelines, shot lists and locations. I plan my gear and my shots around the location and the timeline. What I bring for an indoor wedding is very different from an outdoor location. Finally I map all locations, and layout my clothes. One the day of the only thing I want to think about is getting all those amazing shots. The getting prepared to shoot a wedding takes up most of the day before the wedding.
On the day of I run around for hours with 40 pounds of gear strapped to me in order to capture all those memories. I’ve actually been described by a groom as a ninja. I wear all black, I sneak around and I draw cameras like weapons.
After the wedding I download everything online incase of a fire, on 2 external hard drives one to back up the other, two computers, all the cf cards don’t get reformat until images are done being edited and discs incase the hard drive fails. Archiving your memories is just as important as capturing them. I’ve actually had several brides loose their images and come back to me and I was able to send them a new discs.
On a typical wedding I shoot about 3,000 images per event. I probably go through each event about 5x. The first time I go through an event I edit out the obvious bad images. The second time I check focus. The third time I color correct everything. The fourth time I get rid of all unnecessary images (I tend to over shoot and edit later) and double check my color corrections. I upload the proofs to an online gallery and release the gallery to my clients. Typically I give my clients 800-1000 proofs to go through. After my clients pick their final proofs I recheck their final selects and export them as high-res jpegs, burn a disk, package everything and mail it out.
Each wedding is actually days of work.