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Wedding Photography Challenges

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That remains as true today as it was then. Wedding photography is one of the most difficult genres in photography. The day is packed with emotional significance for the wedding couple - and you have only one chance to get every moment of their big day captured.

Add to the challenges low lighting in churches and reception venues - and you can see how easily a shoot can go seriously wrong.

Wedding Photography Tips

1. Don't even think of doing a wedding photography shoot as the primary photographer if you have no or little experience in the field. It doesn't matter how much you would love to help out a friend of a friend by providing some low-cost services. If the end product is not acceptable, there won't be a friendship left! The best experience you can gain is offering your services to a professional wedding photographer to act as a second photographer at a wedding shoot. Do a good number of weddings so you can get a feel for the challenges - and watch and learn as much as you can.

2. Be assertive when it comes to crowd control. Act with confidence even if you don't feel all that confident. Everyone in the wedding party looks up to you to take the lead and tell them what to do. Consider taking an assistant to round up family members and pose them. It will save you a lot of stress.

3. Use a wedding photography checklist to help you work in an organized and efficient manner. It will help you focus on what needs to be achieved and ensure that you don't forget any important shots.

4. Know your camera and check the controls on your camera frequently. You may have a specific setting for outdoor shooting - and then in all the confusion forget to change your settings when you move indoors, or vice versa. It's also good practice to use your preview button to check images.

5. Make sure that you get the wedding photography lighting right. Experience in portrait work will help you in this regard. Learn what you can from other photographers and practice, practice, practice!

6. Shoot in RAW. If something goes wrong, this gives you the best chance of producing quality images through post-processing. However, it's always best to get things right in-camera to save you loads of stress and work in the digital darkroom. And remember, the one thing that you cannot fix afterwards is blurry photos. You've got to set a fast enough shutter speed so that you don't end up with a lot of out-of-focus images.

7. Overdeliver. If you've set certain expectations in terms of what you clients can expect, you have to over-deliver on those promises. This is especially true for when they can expect to receive the finished product. Leave enough time between wedding shoots that you can do what needs to be done to complete the whole process.

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