Being the Second Photographer

A Wedding Working as the Second Photographer

A few years ago, pre-COVID, I was invited to be the second photographer at a High Desert Museum wedding. I have to say it was fun doing pictures and then simply turning them over to the main photographer for processing. Shoot and scoot. I of course brought my full game to the wedding, it was just the second part of it, the editing, was super easy because I didn’t have to do anything. Just save a couple favorites from the wedding for my own use. And here they are being used today. A couple of them anyway.

The groom and a couple others in his party had been or were currently serving in the Marines and Air Force. I’ve done military weddings a few times now and it’s always fun seeing how they pay such close attention to their uniforms. It’s important they do. I’m definitely not looking down on them for it, but it’s interesting seeing how they look at each others uniforms and whatever ribbons and pins are showing. The story all those badges tell eliminate the need to ask “What’s your major?” style questions. A proper uniform is a reflection of the person wearing it, and a person needs to look their best at a wedding.

As the second photographer I was sent to what many consider the lesser assignment of the groom getting ready before the wedding. Except with military people putting on their uniforms, the groom is definitely the more interesting getting ready pictures. So I jumped at the opportunity to see the almost ritual donning of the uniform for these guys.

Another point of being the second photographer is I learned their names at the wedding, but then forgot their names afterwards because I didnt’ need to save the pictures in a special file with their names. So I’m sorry to not have the personal touchy feely aspect to this post. As a straight-up trained and experienced photojournalist I don’t really have that going on for me anyway. I work my butt off at weddings doing pictures, not making lifelong friends. Actually, when I’m shooting and concentrating so hard while working I don’t even hear what people are saying except maybe temporarily in passing. I’m only paying attention to light, composition, and emotion and making every effort to get the “decisive moment” pictures.

One of the first lessons in photojournalism school was to frame our pictures from edge to edge. We had an assignment every week to shoot, then developed in a real live dark room, and then picked the three best pictures from the assignment to show in class. The pictures had to show the edges of the frame - meaning the entire picture left to right, top to bottom with a little bit of the uncropped frame showing. It was amazingly effective training. The frame of a 35mm camera is a 6x4 ratio and I’ve learned to fill that frame with information and not have anything extra. One bonus is during editing I barely ever have to crop a picture, saving time. I’ve tried to shoot in a square 1x1 and old school 4x5 formats but fail miserably. I’m really well trained to the 4x6 format.

Side bar: it’s the reason why when people buy portrait boxes in the Full Monty option I give them 8x12 matted pictures and not 8x10 even though the standard 8x10 would be way easier for me.

Anyway, for this wedding I shot my standard fill-the-frame 4x6 style. The couple who were the primary shooters were really frustrated with me because of this and said they had to photoshop edges into the frames they sent out because they shot much looser and could always crop to 4x5. I just shrugged my shoulders because that would’ve landed us photojournalism students in the hot seat for shooting so loosely.

So with my, or indeed anyone’s, pictures please pay attention to the entire picture and ask yourself if it’s exactly full of information with not too much or too little. Also understand I’m shooting these as full framed pictures barely ever cropping. Most of my rare crops are to trim a tiny bit of extra out like a twig or bright edge.