The featured image today was not part of a wedding photography assignment but was made in my home studio with a new model who I photographed for the first time. I often ask married models to bring their wedding gowns to a session, if they still have them, and Courtney brought hers. I previously had a session with Pam Simpson where she brought her grandmother’s wedding gown and my photograph of her ended up on the cover of Shutterbug. For more information about how I made the featured bridal portrait, please read my post “I Wanted To Write A Post About Wedding Photography…” that post also has some of my thoughts about the art, craft and business of wedding photography.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small. — Quote Lao Tzu
Sometime around 1970, my friend Rich who worked with me as an engineer for a Great Metropolitan Telephone Company, told me: “I heard about this studio that will teach you how to photograph weddings, they’ll lend you the equipment, and pay you to make photographs.” I’ll be honest it was the pay part that caught my attention.
At the time, I considered myself to be an ace photographer having made pictures with a box Brownie since I was eight years old and in high school upgraded to an Argus C3 that my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday. By the time Rich told me about this opportunity I’d graduated to shooting with a used Minolta SR-1 that another engineer, Eddie, sold me. He was a true gentleman who inspired me not just about photography but also through how he lived his life, although it took me a while to figure that part out.
The Learning Curve
During this time I read everything possible about the craft and history of photography and arrogantly believed I knew everything there was to know about photography, not realizing how much I still had to learn (and am still learning to this day.) I finally reached a point where I knew what I didn’t know about photography, which is an important milestone in any photographer’s career and I hope you get to that point sooner than I did.
That studio ended up hiring me as a freelance wedding photographers but the reality was a little different than what Rich originally thought: The studio would, in fact, lend us equipment but only for a short time assuming that we would eventually buy our own gear. They would provide training by having us work on real weddings—for free—alongside one of their experienced pros. For some reason, Rich passed on this opportunity but it’s how I entered the world of wedding photography.
One of those pros I trained with was Bob, another employee of that same Great Metropolitan Telephone Company, a talented wedding photographers and one of the nicest guys I’ve ever known. Bob taught me to be a wedding photographer by example. On the job, he was invariably polite, never got flustered, something I never mastered, and he was always the consummate professional delivering a quality product to the client
If there is any form of professional photography that teaches you how to make salable images under the most challenging mental and physical conditions you’ll ever encounter, it’s weddings. Lots of photographers I’ve met don’t like shooting weddings with the most interesting reason one gave me being, “I don’t like working with crazy people under pressure,” which pretty much sums up what it’s really like to photograph any wedding. Nevertheless I think that photographing weddings is one of the best boot camps there is for learning how to be a professional photographer. If you’re just getting started and can find a studio that will pay you to shoot for them, you’ll learn a lot in a relatively short time.
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