The Reluctant Photographer

I'm not the kind of girl who is into weddings. That is, big wedding affairs with expensive dresses and flowers and bridesmaids and churches…it's all alien to me. Of course, I've been to plenty of weddings for friends and family to show my support, but it always feels a bit like I'm walking on the surface of the moon.

There was a time when I thought I'd have to spend every weekend at a wedding. That was back when I was a portrait photographer. I studied marketing and business enough to know that the best way to build a sustainable photography business was to do weddings in addition to portraits. Weddings made decent money and helped keep your business afloat between creatively-fulfilling portrait sessions.

However, I also knew that to do a fabulous and distinctive job as a wedding photographer, you had to be committed to it. That meant getting the right equipment (not the same as for the studio work I love), experimenting to develop your style, and constantly learning more about the genre. For me, that pretty much spelled torture. Even though I risked my financial future, I decided not to do weddings. Did that mean I didn't make decent money? All I'll say is that you'll notice that I'm no longer a professional photographer!

This weekend, though, I was drafted into the ranks of wedding photography. At the end of last October, when my father announced his engagement, he told me I had a choice. I could either photograph the wedding or be a bridesmaid, presumably in blue chiffon. You do what you have to do.

My digital SLR was brand new to me when told me this and we had less than three months to the wedding. I've been spending the last two months trying to learn everything I can about how to use it for event photography. Without the proper lighting and the lightweight equipment needed for this kind of photography (my tripod, for example, is made for studio use) I had no idea how I would make it work. As the day drew near I discovered that, like most churches, theirs has a list of requirements that would be no problem for an experienced wedding photographer. However, for an anal-retentive studio photographer like me, they made me want to breathe into a crumpled paper bag, as they required me to make quick lenses and lighting changes that I am not used to making. Ack!

Well, this Saturday was the big day. As it turned out, I showed up and somehow, nothing exploded and nobody died. I still didn't have the lighting I needed for this sort of thing and the lighting in the church was, as expected, pretty awful, but through the wonders of digital darkroom work, I figure I'll get something decent. Church rules dictated that I had to stay at the back of the church, so I have no idea what anyone said during the wedding, but I was too busy dragging a heavy tripod from one end of the church to the other to pay attention.

The reception was held in the church campus center, under fluorescent lighting. Let's hear it for digital white balance settings, or we could have written off those photos! The entire reception was a bit surreal—church rules prohibited both champagne and dancing—but it's not my wedding. And at 76, I'm not sure how much my father was longing to kick up his heels. Nonetheless, I'll confess that desperately wanted to skid into the room with a big boom box (a la Kevin Bacon in Footloose) and loosen these people up.

But alas, instead of stirring the pot, I just kept taking photo after photo of people I didn't know while the sweat crawled down my back, trapped by the synthetic fibers of an outfit that I will never wear again. It's all part of the wedding ritual, right?

Best part is: it's over. And between you and me, that's the last wedding I will ever photograph.

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