As you might imagine, Twila and I get asked on a regular basis to photograph or video weddings. I’m not sure if it is because we are so good at what we do or if it is because everyone else is so expensive. Let’s go with the first choice.
In a previous life… maybe three or four back… I did photograph weddings. But this was in the true olden days when I would show up, shoot five or six rolls of film, send it off and pray that not only did I get good pictures… there was no preview screen except what my experience showed me in my head… but also pray that the postal service didn’t misplace the film on the way to and back from the lab. Never mind that some kid dealing with the film by touch in the dark didn’t drop it in his cup of coffee or some under-maintained machine didn’t have a fit and chew it up before the prints were made. Yes, those were the scenarios that would play through my head until the prints and negatives were back in my hands. It was a nightmare that was never offset by the few dollars I made on a wedding.
In a later previous life, Twila and I thought it would be fun to video weddings. We were blessed to have the equipment to video and edit the blessed events, and once people found out we were doing that we had more than plenty to shoot. However, it didn’t take us long to realize that even though it was less stressful… we could see what we were recording on our viewfinder screens… the new projects came with their own versions of stress.
First, just to be clear, it was almost never the brides who were problems. For the most part, brides were adorable girls excited about their big event and thrilled to know someone was going to record it so they could relive it over and over until the divorce. No, there were usually two major sources of wedding video stress… mothers of the brides and future party animal husbands.
I get it. Mothers care about their little girls and they want the best for them. They have invested thousands of dollars… usually tens of thousands of dollars… in their little girls’ starter marriages and they want the absolute best for them. But one thing I learned from mothers of the brides… don’t be a back-seat producer. I have spent years producing everything from four-second-long station IDs to 24-hour-long telethons and I try to always allow the wonderfully creative people with whom I work to make me look good. Sadly, most, and I stress most here as I can remember one or two amazing moms… but most mothers of the brides could give Trump lessons in demanding micro-management.
So, we survive the mothers and the wedding and get to the beautifully-decorated reception. This starts out as a classy, beautiful party that lasts about an hour… and then it generally turns into a wild, drunken celebration. You have not lived until you have tried to video the groom and groomsmen dancing the Macarena… drunk… or the groom doing the worm dance on his belly across the dance floor or a groom who truly can’t sing dancing on the stage and singing “New York, New York” at the top of his lungs… no matter what song the DJ was playing!
So, after a few years of doing wedding videos, Twila and I decided we had enjoyed enough of the fun and retired. I swore to one and all, never again. However, if you read this space regularly you already know that I had to eat those words twice. Once because of a weak-moment promise to my two most favorite great-nieces in the world that, yes, Uncle Tim will shoot pictures at your weddings… thank God one of them has had the good sense not to get married… yet. And then Big Brother Max invited us to his step-daughter’s wedding. “And, oh yeah, bring your cameras.” That was his subtle way of saying that even though both sides of the family are very wealthy, we are either too cheap to pay a real wedding photographer or you are so good we won’t let anyone else shoot the wedding. Let’s go with the latter reason. So, in recent history, Twila and I have shot two weddings. And, God help us, we did enjoy shooting both. Of course, the fact that both families got the, “I’m the uncle, I’m the photographer and I’m in charge” speech probably didn’t hurt. And the fact that Twila carries a Glock and is the best shot I’ve ever seen also carried some weight, I believe.
So, I say all that to say, with our newest Nikon camera and lighting equipment and our amazing Macintosh editing computers, shooting weddings is actually fun. Now if we could just do something about those mothers and grooms!
