AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 25 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography. I am a full-time self-employed pro wedding photographer.
Experience About 25 years experience photographing weddings professionally. Past 3 years shooting digital exclusively.
Education/Credentials Going to photography seminars and reading all the wedding photography books I can find then applying the techniques and new styles I've learned with each wedding. You always need to grow and learn to keep up in this field. With each new wedding you photograph, you must challenge yourself to do better work than your previous wedding. You must always have the goal of making the wedding photographs for a bride & groom be the best photographs they have seen of any wedding.
Expert: John Wilson Date: 1/3/2008 Subject: Wedding Photography
Question I am intrested in becoming a wedding photographer but I don't know what to do to get started or anything really. I love weddings and I love to take pictures so I'm thinking that it would be a good career for me. Thanks so much, Sheena
Answer Hi Sheena,
Thank you for your question about getting started in wedding photography. You mentioned you love weddings and you love to take pictures. That's a great start for becoming a wedding photographer.
I would like to recommend purchasing a couple wedding photography books. Read them, study the photography samples and as you do so you will have to ask yourself if you are up to it.
Besides having great and reliable photography equipment and back-up equipment with you which you are completely familiar in the operation of, as the photographer you will also have to have mature social skills. You will need to be able to know how to deal personally, sensitively and politely with a variety of different people. You will need to be able to quickly gain their trust, confidence and cooperation. You will need to be able to "take charge" without coming across as being "bossy" or "rude".
So it's great to love people besides loving weddings and loving to take pictures. Wedding photography is people photography and it is people photography on a day when many people are very emotional and stress often runs high. You have to respectfully interact with people dealing with a variety of emotions and feelings.
Unless you set rules in the wedding contract that no one else is allowed to take pictures, you will have to learn to deal with a bunch of amateur digital photographers who think they are as good a photographer (usually better) than you are as the professional photographer the bride herself chose over them! The amateurs will take up valuable time you could have posing and shooting. The amateurs will have the bride and groom smiling so much that the bride and groom may get tired of smiling so much and so their smiles may start being less genuine in your own photographs. Sometimes amateurs become hacklers who make every sarcastic comment they can think of because they fancy themselves as a better photographer than you. They do this without thoughtfully considering they are actually hurting the feelings of the bride and upsetting most of the other guests with their rudeness. What makes this difficult for me is that 99% of the time I know those amateurs knowledge and skills will probably never in their life time even scratch the surface of the knowledge and skills I have acquired over the last 25 years. But, I keep my cool and gain more respect from those who hired me.
To learn some more about the art, science and business of wedding photography, you may also visit my website at http://www.weddingphotographics.net
Wedding Photographer John Wilson
Chattanooga, Tennessee
