Did you ever work as an assistant?

[joshranwest]

I started with assisting. Did some of those, then went straight to doing on my own. That was 11 years ago, now I hire assistants with little or no experience. I love giving back, and helping out budding photographers! Especially the ones who have never done a wedding and are nervous! We have all been there!

[hjoseph7]

This is a great book if you want to become an assistant.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Photographers-Assistant-Handbook-Matt-Proulx/dp/0240804139

[conraderb]

I did both. I assisted for four weddings and then slowly started doing my own gigs. I never expected to 'be a photographer', but here I am, and I'm loving it.

 

Assisting is a great way to see a lot and learn a lot without much responsibility, but you can get stuck in that vein. One photographer I worked with told me that her assistant had done over 250 weddings with her.

 

YIKES.

 

nothing wrong with loyalty, but there is a certain point where by assisting, you aren't learning anything anymore and you are either holding yourself back or not facing up to the truth that you aren't good enough to be the main photographer yourself.

[ben_rubinstein___mancheste1664880652]

I taught myself photography, I learned my f-stops from my elbows myself. What I didn't learn and only knew from experience was how to deal with people, how to cope with things going wrong, in short how to use the camera skills in the 'field'. Because I was assisting when I learnt that, I didn't screw up anyone's wedding, didn't get in the way of the B&G's most important day of their lives while I used them as a learning tool!

 

Knowing how to handle your camera is probably the smallest part of wedding photography.

[giovanni_cartella]

I was a assistant for a couple of years, depending on the studio, fortunately the studio I used to work for had great crews, the Assistants were mostly teenagers and we all got along with the older people, age didn't matter because we all knew each other from the neighborhood. I could take the bags, tripods, setting up lights, holding the flash but I couldn't take the unappreciation or the miss treatment.