You need the personality or personality to handle bride/momzilla but that aside it is like any customer service job. You need the organization of a minor event planner, so just prepare in your head, on paper, make to do lists and such. Not difficult but does go easier with a bit of forethought.

While you might be offered refreshments at the reception do not drink. Don’t laugh, I know a professional Miami photographer who drank and danced at a wedding and then was surprised by lousy shots. It will effect your photography.

Use the modes that come with your camera to lighten the work load-I do most of my photos on portrait, landscape. night scene or automatic. use a tripod. There are very few shots that require adjustment outside of that. Check and see if your camera can handle higher ISO’s without too much graininess in the photos. If not then spend a bit on extra lighting for indoors shots. It is good practice to go to some parties and venues with similar activities and lighting and practice so you see what challenges might have.

I shot my friend’s wedding last year, my first!

It was a little nerve wracking but they were on a very tight budget and had I not accepted they’d have been forced to ask an uncle with a point and shoot compact.

The whole family were so thankful and loved the images but there were a few things I’d have done differently if I had the chance again.
At the end of the day if you don’t try, you’ll never learn. Every wedding photographer had their first wedding to shoot and from reading countless posts, everyone makes rookie mistakes somewhere down the line.

As long as you’re confident in your ability to take a good photo and you don’t makes wild claims of being so very experienced then I say go for it. Just make sure you have the basics covered, enough memory cards, spare battery, things like that tend to help

A few of my wedding shots are on my website, and no, they’re not the most amazing in the world but did make one family very happy and that, in my book, is all I need to know to feel I did a good job!

http://www.diffusephotography.webs.com

L.Mathe

There are lot of “the most important” things, but if you don’t do anything else, make sure your shots are clearly in focus. I’m assuming you’re using a digital SLR camera. All DSLR’s have several focal points (those red dots or squares in the viewfinder). Change to a single focal point in the middle. The default on most DSLR’s is to have all focal points activated. Since you will most likely be shooting in aperture priority, you want to make sure that you focus in on what you want to be tack sharp. For instance, when the bride and groom are kissing, you want to make sure you focus in on the couple and not the minister standing behind them. Unless you sent your focal point to a single point in the middle, you’ll never know what you’re going to get in focus. During the heat of the moment, you don’t have time to check your LCD and try again.

2. I had no assistant either. Again, it didn’t cause a catastrophe, but I keep thinking how nice it would have been for me to get shots of the bride when she went to the hairdressers that morning while I was waiting at the civil registry… or how nice it would have been to have different angles of the “must have” moments.. like when she began getting emotional during her personal tribute to the groom.. or when they slipped the ring on each other’s fingers.. or when they were smearing cake on each other’s tongues. Again.. the shots were not bad at all, but I keep thinking several different angles of the same moment would have a good chance of making a good job a great one.

3. Aperture priority was great for most shots, but I slipped into automatic exposure, optimized for portraits for quite a few, and even went fully automatic for others where I wanted a deep depth of field. Also, I made sure I shot everything in RAW, because I knew that without just the right exposure, its easy for that white dress to get blown out if everything else is properly exposed. With RAW, a little creativity with the cropping and other adjustments can help turning an average photo into an better one.

4. Ummm I DID charge… not as much as a professional would of course, but I feel guilty about doing free work for jobs that pros should be doing. I also figure that if they liked my work well enough beforehand to even THINK of getting me to do the wedding, the least I could do was put some hours into preparing and practicing so as to get the best possible shots. And my time is VERY limited. So after telling them that a wedding is really for professionals cuz you only get to do it once, and after they still INSISTED that I do it, I asked them what their budget was, and we negotiated from there. I don’t know if this is recommended practice or not, but that’s what I did with it. I did not know the bride and groom personally, but the sister of the groom is my boss. They’ve all seen a lot of my work.

5. The bride mentioned that she particularly wanted me because I hardly ever take anything besides candid shots that tell stories of events.My entire interest in photography was to use it as a medium for journal-making. Posing for the camera is something I view with quite a bit of distaste. As a result, even the shots that absolutely demanded that people be set up for group shots, my approach is to make that set-up part of the story by assigning a member of the group to be the “director on set.” In retrospect, maybe that only worked well because the bride had a good eye. I came away from the shoot with a mental note to get better at this aspect of photography as well, instead of automatically frowning at it.

This saved us much time not editing photos that were not going to make it to print anyway.

It is highly stressful and everything seems to happen at a million miles an hour, so I’d echo the point earlier in the discussion about a comprehensive shot list. There are plenty on the web which you can customise.

Another thing which is key to me is to know your venue. If you can, head out there the day before at the time the wedding is due and check light, where the sun is, nice places to shoot, so you don’t waste time looking during the day. If it’s used regluarly, snoop on another wedding and see where the photographer takes his photos.

Re: Aperture priority, the aftermatch festivities are very much like a sports event, you can get a lot of colour shots which help tell the story of the day, but you need to react quickly, so I use AP for general shots so I don’t waste time changing settings for those one off instant shots.