Thomas J.

On camera flash pointed directly at the subjects in a dark reception room is not the sign of a professional. Sometimes, if the situation permits, on-camera flash bounced off the ceiling is acceptable. When I first started shooting weddings 6 years ago, I had a 6D and it did fairly good job (with a 35mm 1.4L) in darkness until I got a 5DMIII and that was way better. However, 1/60th at f4 in a dark room..... lens with a max aperture of f/4 is not a good low light lens and will have a lot of difficulty focusing and 1/60th is just too slow to stop action or avoid camera shake.....for the most part. Since I went professional years ago, I have gone to one wedding and several other events where there was a professional photographer and as a professional myself I dare not critique the paid shooter under any circumstances unless they were doing something completely ridiculous.....which hasn't been the case at least in my experience. If you first or second shoot weddings or events yourself, then you might say "I think I would've tried this, or moved here, etc" but if you're a guest at a wedding and have a camera, for the love of God, stay out of the way of the paid shooters!!! My goodness I've had to give some nasty stares at the guests (w/cameras) who walked into my frames or were trying to get a shot right next to me.....and the ones that jump into the aisle during the procession or second procession....oh, well, this forum would not allow the words I'd use to describe those folks.

Absolutely none. I'm a wedding shooter and I can't even fathom using anything but my Canon SLR's and lenses. 2-card slots are also a non-negotiable when doing weddings or other paid shoots. If it don't have dual cards......sayonara baby. Like someone else said above, I don't like EVF's either. I checked out a Sony A7 Mark something at Adorama and I thought the EVF was lagging just a hair.....plus that system costs a fortune to build. The latest Canon (and Nikon) mirrorless offerings are cool though, but they only have one card slot.....not for professional use. If and when I go on vacation, I'll still take one of my spare SLR's and pop a kit zoom on it.

I was a second shooter for two full years (about 40 weddings) before I had the confidence and experience to become a wedding first shooter, or main photographer. Before I was even a second shooter, I was shooting photo journalism for the local newspaper and I also shot youth team sports portraits and team portraits. I was amateur for 8 years before I was hired by a studio to second shoot. I made $20/hrs to start. Indeed, I had knowledge of exposure, shooting in manual, and a decent command of my speedlight, but when I look back now, I was getting paid to "practice" on paying clients. There were certain expectations of course, I had to get a critical number of professional looking images, but was every frame I shot great? No freakin' way!! Many times, if you're exposure is close, a lot of shots can be worked on in Photoshop but the deal with wedding photography is you have to get it right in the camera. And that takes experience. And real experience comes from just doing it. Amateurs who want to go into wedding photography have to start somewhere......there's very, very little real life shooting practice that can emulate the hectic pace and drastic lighting changes of wedding photography, so many photographers daring to go into wedding photography have to experience the brutal learning curve of real time wedding photography. Furthermore, the learning never ends no matter how many weddings you shoot and I don't care who it is, mistakes and missed shots are going to happen. So, is that still getting paid to practice? I have always been my own worst critic and still am. I think my shots stink and all I see when I review my shots from the day are all the mistakes and "shoulda, coulda, woulda's". However, the studio still books me 30 weddings a season (I work full-time office day job), so I let other people be the judge. I do recognize that many of my required shots look really beautiful but I also recognize that you're only as good as you're last shoot. There's so many obstacles that you come across in every wedding shoot and that's even harder to manage than getting great exposures. But at the end of the day, if brides and grooms were complaining, I would have heard it long ago. So, I just keep rolling and creating great images through the all chaos. Like I said, it's the most harrowing and pressurized shooting situation but I have to add that it's also an exhilarating feeling when you've created "hero" images for the bride and groom. The bottom line is that you go out and you work your hardest for the Bride and Groom to get a critical mass of great shots that are on the studio shot list. It's also why there are two photographers at a wedding 95% of the time. We are human and humans are imperfect beings. Is every single shot you take going to be a "magazine" shot? No way. There's also the old adage, "You get what you pay for" and that goes for wedding photography too. The higher the rate b&g's pay, the higher the expectations, the lower the rate they pay, the lower the expectations should be. That's not to say that just because you got paid $300 bucks for 12hrs of work that you can muck it up and not give a you-know-what but you can't beat yourself up either or else you'll never work another wedding.

I agree with William Michael in that you don’t know what the bride and groom will think but it is very true that some people will really like photos you yourself thought were boring or whatever. Don’t worry about it, you went above and beyond and they paid very little for your services. More importantly, as someone who shoots 30 weddings a year, I can attest that wedding photography is one of the most harrowing and pressurized situations for a photographer to be cast into. I still feel the stress even after years of experience, and I shoot with a second shooter too 90% of the time. Solo shooting a wedding, like you did for your first one?!?! Wow, I don’t blame you for not wanting to shoot weddings again!! I’m sure you got some nice shots that the B&G will love. It’s been my experience that many couples only frame a couple of wedding photos, the rest go into albums that might be looked at once a year if that.

How many "everyday" shooters are there that carry around $3000+ cameras everywhere they go? Or how many will be willing to spend several thousand $$$ on a new system right now? Tourists tend to use consumer DSLR's or P&S's or, more and more, just their phones. How many mirror less cameras will they sell to this crowd.....rhetorically speaking. And yes, the vast majority of the wedding shooters I work with and encounter all use Canon SLR's, couple of Nikon folks, but there's only been a tiny few wedding shooters I've come across that shoot Sony mirrorless cameras and God bless 'em I guess. I never had an inkling of desire to jump on the Sony bandwagon and would probably not ever go all mirrorless anyway, for a variety of reasons. However, I am very intrigued by Canon's full frame EOS R mirrorless system and perhaps would have entertained buying one as my second camera.....some shiny new tech, still use my current L lenses, save a little weight on my harness and all that jazz. No dual card slots? Not buying. So if many of the thousands of other wedding and event shooters out there feel like I do about insisting on dual card slots, then that's a lot of potential sales that might not happen. I dunno, I think Canon and Nikon should care about that. Of course, SLR's will still be available for years to come, so they'll make their sales that way from professional shooters, but still......

I'm a wedding photographer....Canon everything for me....and I'm just itching to check out the EOS R system. It looks awesome!! However, I'm reading the specs on Canon USA and what I find disappointing is how one has to dig into the specs to find out how many memory card slots the R will have available. Furthermore, the spec sheet does NOT say how many slots it has, only that it takes SD/SDHC/SDXC cards! What?? I highly suspect that the EOS R will only offer up one slot like the Nikon Z. This is just unbelievable!! ........I can't even fathom why Canon is serving up such a juicy full frame mirror-less camera without DUAL CARD SLOTS! Maybe I'm wrong, but if it had two memory slots, wouldn't that be highlighted along with all the other bells and whistles the R system features?? There was a time when I shot weddings with cameras that had one card slot and that was STRESS on top of STRESS, but there is NO WAY I'm going to ever do that again. If I got to keep using my Mark IV and III for the foreseeable future, so be it. I'll see you on that auction site where I'll be buying spare DSLR's on the cheap when everyone else starts selling them to get the EOS R system!

Really nice lighting, I like how you lit them, nice work. As a wedding photographer myself, I totally appreciate and respect shooters who know how light their subjects and aren't afraid (or just lazy) to do so at live events. As everyone knows, weddings almost always take place in the worst lighting (indoors and outdoors) where we're always trying to make the outside look like inside and the inside look like outside. Command of your speedlights and strobes is critical. It's a labor of love and struggle but it's a big part of the job and you demonstrate your fine lighting skills in these pictures. I guess I'd echo what others have already said and that's cutting off limbs is a no-no (every photographer has made this boo-boo), especially when you have plenty of space to back up. Also, mix up the shots.....head to toe, waist up, shoulders up, portrait and landscape. I can't seem to figure out what focal length you shot at in these but I feel like it's wider than 50mm...... anywhere from 85mm to 200mm would be the optimal focal lengths for portraits like these, anything wider than 50mm are going to look somewhat off.....unless you're doing an environmental and want to make them smaller in the frame, then go wide.....but wide angles distort easily, as you are probably well aware. Best of luck at the wedding, you're going to do well and make photos your granddaughter will cherish.

I'm a part time professional wedding and event photographer in NYC and I can't imagine doing what I do with 35mm film. I've shot lots of film "back in the day" when I was learning the craft until DSLR's made the scene. However, my photography mentor was a professional wedding photographer in the 80's and 90's before going digital in the mid-2000's until retiring 5 years ago. How did it unfold for him going digital? He bought a Canon 1D, slapped his lenses on, started shooting digital, and never shot another wedding (or anything else) with 35mm film ever again.

I'm a professional photographer (weddings) and have used Aperture and then Lightroom for the past 10 years. Trying to get opinions on the best (closest to LR) editing and DAM software that I can actually buy (or download) a hard copy. Thank you.

You can't picture anything pal, I don't think you're funny, and I don't even eat cake when I shoot weddings. I guess amateurs like you wouldn't know that during wedding shoots there's hardly any time to even eat an hors d'oeuvre never mind cake. You really should stop showing your ignorance. Canons have silent shutter modes which us professional shooters employ often.

Good point. When I'm shooting weddings, I often changes lenses and never turn the camera off, indoors or outdoors, wherever....no time to flip switches, so I'm sticking with Canon, of course. I shudder to think if I had to do the same with a mirrorless system and that exposed sensor. Yikes. Also, Wouter Willimse said it perfectly up above and pretty much won the debate: "Spending a lot of money on gear isn't going to make you a better photographer, having the latest and greatest body isn't going to make your photos any better than those made with much cheaper and older gear."

It's going to be difficult to shoot in that scenario without a flash. Try getting a prime lens that opens to f1.4 or 1.8.

Pain point #1 for me: wedding guests with iPhones getting into my frame when I'm shooting a wedding.

<p>I'm a freelance wedding photographer, working for a few different studios during high season May to October. I work a full time job so shooting weddings is my "side hustle" and I do love it. Over the past years though, it's been quite obvious that, if I go by wedding guests preferences, the cell phone camera is by and large the camera of choice for most people these days. The decline in camera sales should come as no surprise to any photographer. Even for me, I'm not upgrading my Canons until one of them gives up the ghost.<br> <br />I tell the shooters I work with that the pictures we produce for all the B&G's we shoot MUST be really, really, really good, or else eventually, weddings will be shot with cell phone cameras as well. The dSLR's days are probably numbered anyway, the only guys left using them with be professional sports photographers. When I go on vacation, I only bring a 35mm Canon film camera and a 24mm and 50mm lens. I use my iPhone for a majority of my casual shots. </p>

<p>I shoot weddings with both the MkIII and 6D and like others say here, if your subjects aren't moving, the 6D is quite excellent and a good value right now.</p>