So last time I shared with you the 10 more exciting things about being a wedding photographer. It’s a pleasure and an honor for me to be invited to photograph one of the most important days of my clients’ lives.
Thought, like any profession, there are not all pink clouds and rainbows. Being a wedding photographer is a difficult job, and not everyone is cut out for it. So, I hereby write down the top 5 difficult things that I have to cope with as a wedding photographer.
1. Foresee the image before the click
Similar to each type of photography, documentary wedding photography requests me to foresee the image before shooting. In other words, as a wedding photographer, I need to be totally aware of what I want to shoot. Of course, there are those spontaneous shots that they thrive! But, for me, it’s incredibly challenging to predict the final image, and then, to set my camera at a glance of an eye and to click the magic button. Thought, at the same time, it makes me love my profession!
2. A little fortune on equipment
Capturing wedding events requires considerable equipment. Multiple lenses, flashes, lights, stands, backup gear, cameras, drones, oodles of batteries and memory cards need to be in my bag. Not to mention enough hard drives to back up the images properly, computers, printers, dozens of programs and software. Each year or even twice a year, new stuff is getting into the market, when most of the time I feel like a child in a toy market! It’s good for me… isn’t it?
3. Mega Amounts of Work
Most people think that wedding photographers shoot on Saturdays, then work one day of the week and they make tons of cash. It’s not true! As a wedding photographer, I work the whole weekend when I shoot weddings, whilst 5 days a week I am sitting before my computers editing the images and videos, I have meetings with prospective clients and I work on the promotion of my business. Yeah, mega amounts of work. Though nowadays the majority of the professions need concentration and to sacrifice a lot of things that one would do for pleasure. C’est la vie and we must enjoy it!
4. Work-Life balance
With all that work, comes the challenge of balance between professional and personal life. Weddings can very easily take over the photographer’s whole life. The difficult part is that the majority of work is being performed at home, so practically the expression “I need to go home and rest” is not cut out for the wedding photographers. During summer, my relationships with friends and family tend to suffer, since I am usually not free on Fridays and weekends. That’s why for me, balance is the cornerstone to maintain my passion and love for my job.
5. Finding a Style
While being a wedding photographer requires diverse photographic skills, what could be most challenging is finding my own style. The wedding industry seems to become obsessed with a different trend every year, and many photographers follow suit. It could be easier to just jump on board and ride the trend. Mmmm, to some extent, I do not find it so wrong to offer to brides some images of the last trends. But trends are capricious creatures, and in the yearly market, something new will come to the surface.
My prediction is that vintage and pastel images, even if I love them, will fly away and once winds change, they’re old news. But I do want my work to have a unique style, to make it appealing to the right kind of bride. And therein lies the challenge, because I know that a unique style isn’t really something that I’ve ever done with. To my way of thinking, my style will evolve as I evolve as an artist. The key to making it unique is to ignore what all other shooters are doing and pave my own way. And let me tell you a secret…: I look for inspiration anywhere other than the wedding industry. I check out what’s happening in the graphic design world, or I visit museums on a regular basis. I do nominate myself as a visual storyteller and try to document a wedding in the most photojournalistic way. My style has diversity and I instill it into my images. Yes, I want to rise above and outlast the trends!