Expert: Wedding Photographics - 3/30/2008

Question
I'm a photgraphy student and am doing a career research paper on Wedding photography. I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me?
1. How did you get into Photography?
2. Why did you want to become a photographer?
3. What type of photography do you do?
4. What types of cameras do you need to use in order to get your shots?
5. What type of schooling do you have that helps you in your job?
6. What does your job consist of?
7. What type of people do you deal with on a daily basis? 8. What is the most difficult thing about you Job?


Answer
Hi Liz,

Thanks for your photography questions. Here are the answers.

1. I got into photography when some high school friends of mine became engaged.  I had simply purchased a basic 35mm Vivitar camera and they knew about it and so asked me to shoot their wedding. Before then, I didn't think of pursuing photography professionally. But I got me a few wedding photography books, studied the sample photos and background info. I wanted to do a good job for them. They were thrilled with the pics.  No, they really were.  I gave them all the negatives as a wedding gift and I was excited that I found something I could do that I was really good at.  (I was 19 at the time and just out of high school).

2.  I wanted to become a photographer because I saw how people really appreciate great quality and style work.  Receiving praise and recognition and eventually making some money was something I wanted.  Still enjoy.

3.  I specialize exclusively in wedding photography and as a full-service wedding photography studio we include engagement and bridal portraiture.

4. We have been shooting with digital exclusively for about 3 years now.  13+ megapixel is the basic requirement in order to blow up, change cropping and other manipulations especially for magazine style wedding album design.  Of course, digital cameras with great dynamic range and using high quality professional optical lenses is a given.  Megapixel count is very often over-looked by many photographers (usually wanting to save the money) but is necessary for medium format film quality and/or photo manipulation options as described earlier.  For example, in an 11x14 Renaissance album, a magazine style album spread with one pic enlarged as a panoramic to stretch across both pages full bleed is a magnification larger than 16x20.

5.  Schooling in my case is simply "hard knox".  Self study.  Always buying every book I can find on wedding photography, photoshop and digital photography in general.  Taking what I studied and applying new techniques with each wedding so I may continue to grow as a wedding photographer and continue to offer each and every new client the benefits of my continued self-education.

6. What does my job consist of?  As a fully self-employed wedding photographer with a home-based studio it means wearing many hats. I have to develop my own marketing, advertising campaigns based on any marketing research I may personally do or acquire. I also design and maintain my own website http://www.weddingphotographics.net I make the decisions if and when to purchase new equipment, repair or replace with something I think might be better.  In other words, every and all decisions have to be made by me - my business stands or falls based on my own decisions.

7. I deal with every type of people.

8.  The most difficult thing about my job for me is putting up with amateur photographers when out shooting a wedding.  So many amateurs think they are just as good as a pro photographer.  They will often try to act respectful and then slowly become disrespectful as they basically try to take over shooting the day.  I imagine very soon I'm going to have to stop it all together in the wedding photography contract.  It wasn't so bad a few years ago with amateurs.  But so many people have digital cameras now almost everyone assumes their shots can't be much less than what pro photographers are doing.  Technically speaking, their little digital instamatic shots or even their little 8 megapixel JPEGs look like crap compared to the 13 megapixel RAW files I shoot and then custom process on my computer to produce 13 megapixel JPEGs of perfect color, contrast, tone and exposure.  Not to mention retouch of blemishes, acne, specular flash reflections off skin and much more.

Hope this information helps.  Best wishes to you.

John Wilson
Chattanooga Wedding Photographer
http://www.weddingphotographics.net