A Smile, Three Kisses & A Dance

This past Saturday I was graciously given the opportunity to work with the talented Liz Cook of Love & Laughter Photography. Liz had a wedding booked in Lynchburg and offered to let me be her second shooter and assistant for the day. Once I was reassured that absolutely nothing from the day would depend on me, I accepted her offer. As I suspected it would be, working with Liz was nothing but a pleasure and I greatly enjoyed the day. My back and feet were pretty tired by the end of it, but the work was enjoyable. I had a good time.

Having said that, I’d like to review what I learned and what I was able (and not able) to do last weekend. This is mostly for my own benefit so that I can come back and reference this post, but also because I’m hoping it’ll make for decent blog content since I’m a little lacking for that these days.

Some things I learned…

  1. Working as a second shooter is hard. - Hear me out. I’m not whining about the work. Not at all. I just learned that you have to focus on the less obvious stuff when working as a second photographer. Every posed shot is going to be for the primary photographer’s camera. No one is ever going to be looking at your lens, so you’d better be prepared to capture those shots from another interesting angle or focus solely on candid shots.
  2. Weddings move fast. - I’ve almost always shot portrait-style shots in completely casual environments. This has always afforded me the opportunity to twiddle with my camera until everything was set just right. There’s no time for that at a wedding. Everything happens on a schedule and you have to get the shots you want when there is time to get them. If you blow it on changing your ISO speed and a set of shots is underexposed, you’d better hope they weren’t important. Even when I’ve shot basketball games it didn’t feel as high pressure as a wedding. Sports may move fast, but the lighting doesn’t change. Easy. Not so with a wedding. Indoor poses, outdoor poses, indoor casual with lighting mixed from fluorescent fixtures and natural light from windows. It’s a lot and you have to adjust your stuff correctly every single time.
  3. I have not mastered flash photography. - Mostly because I hate it. It is, however, a necessary evil (in my view) and I’m going to have to learn to get it right and make it useful. I prefer natural lighting, period. I would shoot with fast prime lenses every time if it were practical. It’s not, though. There’s too much going on and a quality zoom lens is going to be the workhorse in such a situation and that means you’re going to have a limited amount of aperture to work with. We’re talking f/2.8 at best. In dimly lit reception halls flashes are going to come out. No matter how much I bounced, diffused and dialed it back I just couldn’t get the lighting to look natural. It was frustrating and I ended up trying to shoot with natural light anyway. That was a mistake which brings me to…
  4. My camera body is a limiting factor. - Let me be clear. I am thankful for my DSLR. I bought it simply to take “better” pictures of my son and have ended up with a hobby that I simply love. The camera has been great. It’s never malfunctioned in anyway. Having said that, the Rebel XTi has its limitations. It is a consumer-grade DSLR and two weekends in a row I’ve needed more than it could give me. Mostly it’s a problem with gain on the imaging sensor, which is what they refer to as ISO speed these days. My proclivity toward natural lighting demands fast lenses and lots of clean gain. I can always get the first, but the Rebel XTi cannot give me the second. You can start to see noise at ISO400 (though it’s nothing bad) and ISO800 is pretty noisy. Unless you get a magic shot where some magic burst of light gives you a perfect exposure, ISO1600 is so noisy that it’s useless for anything beyond a small picture for the web. That’s it. That’s the max you get. Because of this, almost none of my pictures from the wedding reception came out useful. They’ve all either got the aforementioned ugly flash or motion blur/noise problems from me trying to force natural light in. There’s nothing I can do about this until I can afford a camera body with better gain capabilities. So, for now I just have to accept that it’s a limiting factor in what I’d like to shoot.
  5. Camera gear is heavy. - For real. Lugging around my camera with the battery grip and a couple of Canon L lenses really put a hurtin’ on my back. It was worth it, though.
  6. I need to come out of my shell. There’s no way to get good candid shots from people that aren’t comfortable with you being around. Liz can walk into a room and have everyone smiling in a few seconds. I suspect it comes natural for her. Maybe not. For me, I can say with certainty that it does not. I am, however, capable. I just have to switch it on. I can’t just hide behind a camera. Lesson learned.

I do feel that I got a few things right. First, I think I did a good job of keeping out of the way. I think my awareness of the primary camera was pretty good and hopefully I wasn’t in very many of Liz’s shots when she reviewed them later. I also feel that I did a decent job of getting the few specific “necessary” shots she asked me to get. Not that they’re spectacular, but they were as good as I could get working from a balcony in the back of a church. So, I had that going for me.

Finally, I did manage to get a few “keepers”. Again, I wouldn’t say they’re anything amazing, but for my first time out they’re images that I was happy to bring home. Just so we’re clear, the first kiss shot is (by far) my favorite. Other than that one I could even take or leave the rest of these…

I think that, with practice, I can compose much better shots in the future. At the very least, I won’t walk away from a reception with just a few useable pictures. It was what a first try should be. I learned. It wasn’t a total failure. It gave me confidence that I can hold my own and, most importantly, furthered my drive to keep trying.