Why wedding photography makes you a MUCH better photographer.

It’s really easy, and quite common, to look at wedding photographers as having taken the easy way into making a living in the world of photography. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a TONNE of photographers out there that should not be charging for their work - or at least not charging more than say, the price of a cheeseburger at Mcdonalds (I do not by any means condone eating Mcdonalds), but let’s not get into that..

If you look at the best wedding photographers out there, and the tremendous quality of work, you can appreciate how hard they have worked to get where they are, and how difficult it is to create such images, and times that appreciation by about a gazillion.

Here are SOME of the challenges you are up against as a wedding photographer..

• You cannot control the lighting all the time, you may be asked to not use flash in a church ceremony. That super steady hand you have honed really comes into practice here, you will need your shutter speed below 100th of a second, jitters are a no go.

• You are one photographer (or one of two) that is required to capture a whole wedding day, a day that is more important to some people present that day than any other day of their life. That means capturing not only the special moments, like the look of the grooms face as the bride meets him at the altar, but also the stupid moments, the uncle breakdancing after a few too many ales.

• You will not always get a cue when the moments will occur, so you really need to be on your feet and on the lookout, tuning into when people are about to laugh, or cry, and shooting them in that moment without them even realising.

The fact is, you need to learn to think on your feet, to capture all the special moments of the day, to adjust to all the different lighting scenarios, the change of pace, the dozens or sometimes hundreds of characters of the day.

It’s a really great feeling after, say, your 10th wedding, when you feel like you are developing your own style and are finally comfortable with all that pressure of a wedding day. Here are some photos, because, well, I took them!