Portraiture Photography | Tommi Gibbons

Photographing a wedding is always a big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you have been chosen to photograph someone’s wedding day they have entrusted you with the responsibility of their special day. A once in a lifetime event that cannot be repeated, I mean you’ve heard it all before, but imagine having your equipment fail because you hadn’t pre-checked it, shrugging and going home. I’d be very surprised if you managed to get another wedding for some time.

Pre-wedding day every photographer (that I know) has their own ritual, their own way of preparing for the monumental task at hand. But, I don’t know their rituals so I can only give you mine and my ritual generally starts about a week (or more) before the actual wedding day.

Now, by ritual, I don’t mean meeting with the bride and groom and deciding on a pre-set photo list. That should have been done weeks or better yet months before the actual wedding day. No, in today’s post what I mean by ritual could otherwise be described as the checking over of all equipment that you tend to use on the wedding day.

Now I find that I am never really satisfied with just sitting in my home using the camera for a few shots and giving it all the a-OK. I’m just a bit more picky than that. With my equipment I like to go over everything and the only real way I know to do that would be to go  out and take photographs, mainly portraits. Because you want to see how the lens/camera/memory card/etc reacts to real world use. So what I do is arrange meet ups with people I know and give them free portraits for the chance to help me test out my equipment.

As well as helping me test my equipment it also gives me something to write about on this blog and I can also get enough footage from my camera to make a video. Today’s video (which should be above) is more of a video blog from my day than anything which you’ll learn from, but you may enjoy it. Even though I am taking portraits of friends of mine at the time I am more focused (if you’ll excuse the pun) on what my camera is doing.

First off, it’s best to check that the auto focus is working correctly (you would be surprised how often it isn’t). When that has been checked I then check the lens on manual focus,  just to make sure that the focusing ring doesn’t get stuck at any point and if it feels a little stiff then it’s best to know this before the wedding day. Once I’ve taken few shots with one lens I then switch over to another and start all over again. Today I was testing out the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 and the Canon EF 28mm f1.8, I was especially eager to test out the Sigma as I had only received it back from repair a few days ago and I needed to make sure that it was working correctly. Like I said earlier, you should test every piece of kit that you are going to be using on the day. I am probably going to also be using my Canon EF 50mm f1.8 and I’ll definitely be using my Canon flashgun so I’ll test those out on my next portrait shoot which will probably be next week.

It’s not just about the lens either; you have to keep an eye on your camera. Just after taking the photograph I’m keeping a mental note of how fast the images are being saved. A fast memory card is a must with Wedding Photography. I generally don’t keep an eye on the battery, this is because two days before the wedding day I charge all my batteries.

So, as I said earlier in today’s post we have Tommi sitting in for me and all the photographs below were taken with the Canon EF 28mm f1.8 except for the first one. I wouldn’t expect portfolio quality shots from today’s post but I am still happy with the results, also, the shots were taken pretty much whenever I remembered that I had a camera on me.

Just before a wedding I tend to doubt my abilities and add that to the fact that I haven’t done any photography recently means that these tests are far more beneficial that usual. Oh, expect some gig shots in about three weeks, just saying.