Wedding Photography Careers And What

You Need To Know

Part Two

As mentioned in part one of wedding photography careers, I receive e-mails or phone calls from aspiring or beginning wedding photographers asking me for advice on how to become successful in the wedding photo field. In Part One, I listed 13 of the very basics of what a wedding photographer will need to be successful.

Although those 13 steps will get you started, below you will read 7 additional steps to really get you to the top of your game, if you are willing to put in the additional work. With that being said, below you will find these steps for fulfilling your career in wedding photography.

1. Read the camera’s manual. Learn what every control function, switch, button and menu item does or does not do. At minimum, you should learn how to zoom in and out, how to turn the on the flash, as well as the off and auto, how to zoom in and out and how to properly use the shutter button.

2. Be familiar with setting the resolution on the camera so that you can take high quality photos at the highest resolution available, as low-resolution images are generally more difficult to digitally alter. In addition, you will not be able to crop as much as you could using a higher-resolution version and still have something printable. If you are using a small memory card, replace it with a bigger one. If you do not want to or can not afford to buy a new one, then use the “fine” quality setting, with a smaller resolution, if your camera includes one.

3. Start by setting your camera to one of the automatic modes, if your camera gives you a choice. The most useful is “Program” or “P” mode on digital SLRs. Ignore advice which suggests that you operate your camera fully manual. In the last 50 years, advances in automatic focusing and metering have happened for a reason. If your photos come out poorly focused or exposed, you should then start operating these certain functions manually.

5. Get outside and motivate yourself to taking photographs in natural light. I suggest taking several normal ‘point and shoot’ photos so that you get a feel for the lighting; both at day and night and at different times. Go out during different stages of the day, especially during times that most people are not out, as you will get different forms of lighting at these times. Quite often you will get spectacular shots you never thought you would see as you may normally be sleeping at this time of day.

6. Keep your lens clear from obstructions such as caps, your thumbs and straps, as well as any other object. It is a basic rule of thumb, but it can ruin a photograph completely. This problem generally does not happen with modern live-preview digital cameras and you have an even less of a chance it happening with an SLR camera. However, people still have a tendency to make these mistakes every now and then.

7. Setting your white balance is an important aspect to good photography. The human eye automatically will compensate for different types of lighting, since white looks white to us in practically any kind of lighting. When using a digital camera, the camera generally compensates for this as it shifts the colors in a certain way. As an example, under tungsten (incandescent) lighting, the colors will shift towards blue to make up for the redness from this type of lighting.

The white balance is the most underused setting on today’s cameras and yet is perhaps the most critical. Be sure to learn how to set it and what all the various settings indicate. If you’re not under artificial lighting, the “Shade” (or “Cloudy”) setting is a good choice in many circumstances, as it will give you very warm-looking colors. If by chance it comes out too red, that can be very easily corrected later in the software. The “auto” function, which is the default function for most cameras, usually will do a good job, but sometimes may result in colors which are a bit cold and you don’t get the warmth you were looking for.

You are now ready to go to part three of this series. I hope you are able to take all of this in and are realizing that there is more to professional photography than just point and shoot.