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Wedding Photography: Why Can't Uncle Fred Do It?

Are you considering asking a friend or relative to photograph your wedding?

Before you do, be sure to get answers to these questions.

Article written by Rogier van Bakel of Eager Eye Photography in Maine

Weddings tend to be joyous but pricey events. Unless you’re independently wealthy (or can count on parents who are), you’ll have to find a way to stay within a limited budget. So if your uncle Fred, who owns a nice camera, offers to cover the wedding for free, that’s great, right? Just think of the money you’ll save!

Boy, you’re onto something here. If you ever need an apendectomy, why not ask your cousin Bob to do the honors? After all, at Thanksgiving, he’s pretty handy with the carving knife!

I’m kidding, of course (kind of). Photography is rarely a life-or-death matter. Then again, on a wedding day, it is mission-critical. Fact is, you simply don’t get a chance to do it over.

So, all joshing aside, may I suggest you ask your camera-toting relative or friend some important questions? In no particular order:

• How many weddings has he successfully covered?

• Does he have experience telling a story in photos, rather than being able to snap a great picture now and again?

• Will he bring two or three professional camera bodies and an array of pro-quality lenses?

• If he shoots with one camera, what will he do if, as Murphy’s Law predicts, it starts acting up?

• Does he have the gear — and the chops — to go from a fisheye to a tele lens in three seconds flat?

• Will he bring a second shooter or an assistant to guarantee total and complete coverage?

• Does he shoot RAW photos (a pro format offering maximum quality and flexibility) or JPEGs (a consumer format whose compression causes imperfections)?

• If he has to shoot in low-light conditions where flash may be out of the question (for instance, in most churches), how will he avoid blurry photos?

• Does he know the difference between shooting at 100 ISO and 1000 ISO? Does he have the software tools and the skill to minimize the grain and digital noise that inevitably show up in pictures taken at high ISO numbers?

• For the critical parts of the wedding, such as the exchange of the rings or the first ‘married’ kiss, can he fire five to eight frames per second, to ensure he can later choose just the right photo in terms of angle, composition, and expression?

• Does he bring remote-controlled flash units? Gelled flashes? Other location lights? Diffusers? Reflectors? Umbrellas? Softboxes? Other light modifiers? Photography is about controlling light, after all.

• Can he fire flash shots with a recycle time of a second or less (which requires an external battery pack), or does he have to wait four or five seconds between shots before his flash is ready again? What number of missed photos would he say he’s comfortable with?

• Will he shoot continuously and with unwavering concentration, as a pro would, and end the day with 2,000 or more photos? Or will he figure that since he’s doing you a favor, it’ll be fine if he shoots a few minutes here, a few minutes there, for a total of maybe a couple of hundred shots?

• How many of those shots does he predict will be magazine-quality — meaning, just as good as a professional photographer’s work?

• Since memory cards are vulnerable to anything from wine spills to hardware failure, does he shoot with ultra-robust, pro-level cards? And to keep your images safe, will he make at least two digital backup copies of all your wedding photos, on different media, before he even leaves the wedding location?

• Has he logged at least a few hundred hours, preferably more, using Photoshop and other powerful industry-standard photo software?

• Once at the computer, does he know how to remove skin blemishes; how to bring out shadow detail; how to sharpen images without ruining them; how to apply natural-looking blur to backgrounds in order to isolate the subject; how to correct lens distortion; how to color-correct images; how to perform top-notch conversions from color to black-and-white; how to apply creative borders, et cetera?

• Will he volunteer to spend up to a week tweaking the images to perfection in Photoshop, considering that most weddings take a professional photographer 20–30 hours of post-production (retouching and the like)?

• Once he’s finished, will he put up a website for you with an electronic shopping cart, so that your guests (as well as the people who couldn’t be there) can watch an online full-screen slideshow of the event, and order archival-quality prints directly from the site?

• How many wedding albums has he designed?

As you can see, asking someone who’s not a pro to take the official wedding pictures isn’t without risks and possible downsides.

I speak from experience.

There’s this guy I know who got married in the mid-1990s. His and his bride’s wedding budget was tight, so he decided to see if someone might shoot the wedding for a small fee, or for nothing. He got his wish, and found an amateur photographer who was grateful just to get the experience. A few weeks after the event, the pictures arrived. The photographer had decided, without prior consultation, to shoot only in black and white because that’s what she was “comfortable” with. And unfortunately, a lot of her shots were murky, grainy, and underexposed. None truly captured the exuberance of the day, or the heart-tugging beauty of the man’s bride.

That guy was me. The wedding was thirteen years ago, long before I ditched my journalism career and took up photography full-time. But since then, on a hundred occasions, my wife and I have regretted not hiring a professional to make a fitting photo record of our day.

It’s perfectly OK if beautiful wedding photos are not a top priority for you. No harm, no foul; not everyone cares as much about photography as I do. Still, consider this: When the wedding food, the flower arrangements, and the honeymoon are long gone, what remains? Hopefully, moving photo mementoes of your wedding — yours for life. Picking the right photographer is important.

I think Uncle Fred will understand.

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European-born Rogier van Bakel, a wedding and portrait photographer, hails from the land of Rembrandt and van Gogh, but is “neither quite that good nor quite that famous,” he deadpans. Van Bakel runs Eager Eye Photography in Maine. His website is at www.eagereyeweddings.com; he can be contacted at (207) 244-4473, or by e-mail at vanbakel@gmail.com.