I photographed my very first wedding this Friday just gone. My good friend Ethel married her best friend and old flame Harold in their back garden with 68 guests in attendance, and I recorded the day pretty much from woe to go - Ethel having her hair done at 1.30 that afternoon right through to her and Harold unwrapping their presents at 1.30 the following morning.
These things I learnt:
- When it's windy and humid, a bride-to-be's curls drop out in a matter of hours and the $140 forked out to the hairdresser seems blimin' ridiculous.
- Don't leave the duty-free pre-wedding Dutch courage Moët in the freezer as champagne slushies are hard to scrape out of a bottle.
- Leave the white chocolate wedding cake in the fridge as long as possible as heat and humidity will cause the tiers to avalanche.
- The Ultimate Lesson of the Day: check that your spare battery is fully charged! Check, check and double-check! The gut-wrenching horror when I inserted it into my camera a quarter way through the ceremony and saw a blank screen in my LCD screen is one I never wish to experience ever, ever again!
- How husbands are handy in such an emergency - mine quickly drove Ethel and Harold's neighbour Arnie up the road to fetch his spare camera.
- That Ethel and Harold's neighbours are wonderful people; not only did Arnie save my neck, we also used their beautiful cottage garden as a setting for the "formal" photos.
- My Canon EOS 400D takes great photos and a five year old Nikon Coolpix doesn't quite come up to scratch next to it, but hell, it was better than nothing. Nothing really would of sucked.
- It pays to talk to strangers sometimes. I would never of known that Arnie was a fellow shutterbug otherwise.
- Arnie has a Canon EOS IDs Mark II - Canon's top of the range DSLR with 16.7 megapixels and full-frame CMOS sensor but oh, the weight of it! It's so bloody heavy it needs a tripod for the body and one for the lens itself; definitely a bloke's camera.
- Yes, as the How To book I took out of the library said: Great wedding photos about making that emotional connection with your subjects. Something that is so much easier to do when you know your subject well but...not so easy when you are photographing strangers.
- I'm not sure if I could photograph strangers on their Big Day, and be happy with the photos I took...
I have a feeling the bride to be cared none about her hair, the damned cake or the fact that their photographer (and friend, God bless her) had a flat battery, it seems to me that Ethel & Harold were most happy about the fact that they had everyone they love there with them on their special day.......oh and what a day!
Ethel & Harold........