Pretending to be a professional wedding photographer with my Fujifilm X100V

I firmly believe that my two favourite hobbies, photography and cooking, are amazing as an amateur but incredibly demanding as a professional. The latter I am basing off accounts like Kitchen Confidential and the botox-resistance of Gordon Ramsey’s wrinkles. For photography however, I’m not just guessing, I recently experienced a taste of the professional life during a friend’s wedding ceremony.

As wedding photography goes, there were enough mitigating circumstances to make this a relatively smooth introduction to professional life:

• I was asked to photograph the legal ceremony a few days before the real wedding that they hired a professional for
• They would be getting professional portraits/group shots on the wedding day
• There were only about 20 people and I knew most of them

Thankfully this made the atmosphere much more relaxed, and I’m really happy with how the pictures turned out!

Below are a few reflections and pieces of advice from the day.

1. As Bob Mortimer famously said “once you have fuji 9, you are a dentist”. Well, the same is true in wedding photography, once you have a FujiFilm, you are a photographer in other people’s mind. Assume your new role with confidence and try to ignore the imposter syndrome as the venue organiser sincerely asks you “In your professional opinion, where should we have the confetti tunnel?”

1. I normally only like to take pictures I think will be worth editing once I import them to my computer, but for a wedding you cannot miss the shot. Move the “taste” aspect of photography to later in the workflow and just spray and pray on the day. I ended up taking 3000 pictures that left 800 keepers and 180 favourites

As an example, I didn’t plan for the petal to fall like that, but it makes the image. I only spotted this fortuitous event as I was culling pictures.

1. Tell the story of the day. I think most people thought I would just take some pictures of the ceremony/people but I was aiming to capture the whole day. That meant walking ahead of the group to get shots of everyone in their environment, walking through the streets of London. This does make it hard to balance being the photographer and also a guest, but the day was relaxed enough that it still felt right.

I also found it fun to focus on the small details, like the Bride’s earring, which actually turned out to be one of my favourite images.

1. People want pictures now. You might have a fancy camera but everyone has a pretty good one in their pockets these days. For a normal wedding job, waiting for the edited images is expected but this was just a warm up to the real wedding in a few days. Later in the pub, I could see people starting to craft their instagram posts of the day and I could feel the moment slipping away. Thankfully, my favourite part of a FujiFilm is the ability to get beautiful images straight out of the camera. I used Reggie’s Portra throughout the day so I just transferred the best 30 from the app and sent them into the group chat before they press post.