This is something I've wanted to do for so long. Being able to tell my side of a story of a wedding day is a great way of sharing the experience, and honestly a great way for me to remember them, and I'm so looking forwards to starting!
For this first one, I'll start easy by just throwing out some thoughts. I'm writing this having just finished the last description on the last image on this site, and though I'm sure I'll change everything within a month or so, for now I'm very happy with it. It's been such a long time coming, but the embarrassment of having people ask for my website and me having to give them either my Facebook page or my old single-page website was getting a bit much. Not sure how I'm going to add this to my business card yet, but I need to get more printed anyway, so hey-ho.
Having just finished the editing for a couple of weddings, I figure now is a good time to say that wedding photography goes far beyond the 15 hour wedding day. There's the hours spent talking to and finding new couples and working out their unique plans, then afterwards the 40 hours or so of editing and care that goes into every photo. As a good rule of thumb, take the time spent taking photos and triple it. That's usually how long editing takes. I can't tell you how many full runs of The Office I've worked through whilst editing weddings. It still makes me teary.
For events, you can often do editing in a little less than double the time spent taking photos. They have far fewer creative and posed shots in them, and there's nowhere near as much need to get perfect lighting, colour balance and uncluttered backgrounds in every shot. People sometimes ask if I will do their wedding for the same price I'd do an event of the same length for, but the reality is an event is much less than half the work. The time taking photos is the same, but I could probably get away with a single camera and a couple of lenses. For a wedding, I carry a whole arsenal, with backups and backups for my backups. If Thanos snapped half my gear on a wedding day, I'd still be able to do it to the level of quality where you hopefully wouldn't even notice. Except for me crying quietly holding a pile of ash. You might notice that. If you do, be gentle with me. I'm in mourning.
Where was I? Right, events. They're also low-intensity on the day. There's far fewer blink-and-you-miss-it-but-oh-my-god-don't-even-think-about-missing-it moments than a wedding, and you generally speaking you can do it with a few timing notes. The food never is as good though.
The point is, weddings are hard work. They're amazing fun, but they're a whole leap beyond events. And if you hire an event photographer for wedding photography, you're gonna get event photography photos. And they're a bummer.
There might be a "related post" option under this, but at the minute there's only 1 post and it's this one. So if you want more, reload the page or read it backwards or something. It's great fun.
