I have been in professional portraiture off an on since 2014. By 2017 I realized my favorite portrait sessions were couples; I decided I wanted to specialize in wedding photography. I have very little experience with weddings-I was a flower girl once when I was 8 or so, I attended my aunt’s wedding, I had my own elopement marriage, then was a bridesmaid for a friend’s wedding. That’s it. So of course I needed to get experience. I attended a styled wedding photography shoot in February to be able to show I can shoot beautiful bridals, details, and wedding details.
I joined a ton of photography groups and let people know I wanted to be a second shooter to help them out at a wedding. I joined secondinseconds.com and also secondshooters.com to be listed as an available second shooter. I asked everybody I knew if they knew someone getting married. One day a GoDaddy coworker mentioned she was going to shoot her cousin’s wedding, super low key event. I asked if I could second shoot for her for free so I can get some experience and she let me tag along 🙂
The Best Part of Second Shooting
The best part of this day, was the amazing feeling when I got home. That this is what I meant to do, that this makes my heart flutter. In my own words at the time-
I have a lot to learn, but am so excited to pursue this adventure in wedding photography. I especially love being able to be a part of the couple’s love story and serve them <3
What I learned second shooting for the first time:
- Wow, my camera’s shutter is loud during a quiet ceremony. I was a little red in the face about it, but I tried to keep a distance from me and the couple and never stand in front of the audience. Now I have read through my camera manual, my shutter is on silent and the focus beep is off.
- I have to learn flash! All of my shoots have been in natural light previously, besides my studio work in college. I brought a flash but really had not practiced with it at an event before. I did some test shots but couldn’t figure it out so I just upped the ISO. With my Canon EOS 5D Mark iii, the grain is not even noticeable!
- Both of us photographers had weird yellow casts on some images and not on others. I thought it was my white balance at first, I had it on auto since I forgot my gray card. That wasn’t it. Then I thought it was this foil banner that was hanging above the couple, that wasn’t it either. A month later, in one my Facebook photography groups I am in, another photographer had this problem. Another photographer let us know it was the lights FLICKERING. It is faster than our eyes notice, unless we are trained on it really. In the US some fluorescent lights flicker every 1/60th of a second. To not have different colored images we have to shoot at a shutter speed slower than 1/60th of a second (which would be blurry less than 1/60th, 1/50th especially on a lens greater than 50mm) thus why a flash is necessary. You can shoot at slow shutterspeeds and get tack sharp images because the flash fires at about 1/200th of a second.
- The lead photographer also gave me a tip to shoot downwards more for portraits. I like to get at eye level which sometimes I do too low. Shooting above is more flattering because it makes you look slimmer. It was also cool to compare shots and talk about editing afterwards. We were both boggled by the weird cast on 1/4 of our images so we used the color saturation to reduce oranges and yellows but that also messed with blonde hair…we worked it out eventually.
- Most importantly I learned I LOVE WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY <3
xoxo,
Kaci Lou
