Second Shooting a Wedding of People I Don’t Know….

This coming Saturday, I’ll be second shooting for a friend of mine (Rachel Garrison).  It will be my first time second shooting, and my first time shooting a wedding professionally for people I don’t know.  In the past, I’ve shot weddings for money, but they’ve all been family or friends.  This will be a new experience for me, and I’m very excited and a little bit nervous.  Fortunately, I now feel like I really have the appropriate equipment, and I’ve been shooting with this basic kit long enough that I know it pretty intimately.

I find shooting weddings to be exhilirating and exhausting.  Most people who have never shot a wedding probably think it has a lot to do with the photography.  And, of course, the photography does matter, but a larger part of shooting a wedding is having the endurance on one’s feet and the ability to go with the flow of a rapidly changing environment where there are a lot of variables out of your control.  I think working in a restaurant all these years, and managing all the various disasters that come up during a shift, have prepared me well for this sort of thing.  I’ve never felt out of my element shooting a wedding, even though some have been better than others.

I don’t know that it’s something I want to do professionally, full-time, but I do enjoy sharing the experience with the couple and their families.  It’s been rewarding to provide memories for these couples, especially in light of my own disasterous decisions for our wedding photographer.

So this evening and tomorrow, I’ll be charging batteries, laying out my bodies, lenses and accessories, deciding how and why and which things need to be packed.  I’ll make sure I have enough memory cards (thank goodness we don’t have to tote around film), I’ll make sure to have spare flash batteries.  I’ll clean front elements, I’ll blow dust off of mirrors and off sensors.  And I will go through all the little things, so that when Saturday afternoon rolls around, I’ll be ready.