The actual wedding day, what hours we really work...
Right now it’s 6.29 am and I’m photographing a wedding today about an hour away from where I live and also where my office is.
The hours that we are booked for are between 1 pm and 8 pm so really it’s not a long day. But think again. Yesterday I would have spent twenty minutes loading batteries into chargers and I’ll spend another ten minutes this morning loading them back into the cameras and flashes. I spent thirty minutes on getting a digital copy of their schedule to load onto our phones as well as print out a hard copy to be safe.
before I leave today I’ll clean all my lenses and bodies so that takes another 30 minutes. Finally, after spending an hour and a half, I’ll be ready to hit the road to the wedding. Now comes an hour of driving so let’s make it two and a half hours before we’ve even taken our first photo.
Now we’ve arrived at our first location and have begun our photography work so we’re off and racing. I’ll now jump to the end of the day. It will be 8 pm or in most cases 8.30pm because things run over all the time. I’ve got an hour to drive home but even when I get home, I haven’t finished work yet. I will unload the memory cards from each camera and we carry three camera bodies with us to every wedding so that means three memory cards taking on average 35 minutes each to load into the computer is another one hour and forty-five minutes. That’s just to get them on one hard drive which isn’t safe enough so I then switch on two external hard drives and prepare two back ups of however many images we took. This process doesn’t take long so let’s make it fifteen minutes.
So in all, to photograph a seven-hour wedding day, I will spend twelve and a half hours of today on that wedding. Let’s also remember the initial meeting, the planning session, emails back and forth, schedules written and typed up, and phone calls made, organising my second photographer and then moving into the highlight reel, the editing phase and final delivery via USB.
I hope this gives you some insight into a usual wedding day for us as your photographers. We love what we do however a lot of what we do goes unseen and therefore may not get the understanding that it deserves. There’s a lot of time and effort that we happily put into photographing your big day and it’s not just the time we spend with you taking the photos that we hope you will treasure for the rest of your lives.
love, peace,
Matt
