To the OP - if I have drifted off-topic, my apologies.
Taking pics is such a subjective experience and nobody has one answer for it all.
Many of us are just ‘amateurs with a viewfinder’ and with a digital camera capable of (whatever) frames per second, auto-whatever, yada, yada. Discard what you don’t want and keep the rest. Post-processioning is easy these days, and to me it robs the experience of waiting for just the right moment. Not that I don’t enjoy the experience.
I have 3 digital bodies and 2 35mm film cameras. I prefer film, but dang, holy cow Batman. It sure is expensive these days.
I know someone in the wedding photo business. They are good enough that that is pretty much their full time job (husband and wife team). Good enough that people will pay to fly them outa town to do a wedding shot.
I once asked the guy “is it as bad as those Bridezilla shows?”
Him “Yes”
And he didn’t seem to want to even talk about how bad it could be :eek:
It depends on what kind of clientele you attract, I guess. It’s been my full-time job since 2005, and I’ve shot probably about 300 weddings, and in all that time, maybe 1-2% were what I’d describe as difficult. It’s possible that I just may be very easy-going, but I suspect the clientele I attract is clientele I actually want. It is possible. Staying away from low budget weddings is a good place to start. The vast majority of brides, in my experience, are pleasant, kind, and easy to work with.
I suspect MOST of his/her clients are okay. But the bad ones are the bad ones
I just found it funny the bad ones were bad enough that he did NOT wanna talk about it. I mean, its gotta be bad if you don’t wanna engage in a good bitch fest while passing the time.
On a related note photo wise. I like to take photos. Done my share. And plenty of the them were rather hard to take and or involved some seriou time/money to get.
Best photo I may have ever taken?
I held a 300 dollar 3 mega pixel run of the mill point and shoot camera over my shoulder and pressed the button when the time seemed about right.
My work is 50% product (mostly food), 20% portrait, 30% real estate. All enjoyable.
My faves for fun are nature, landscapes, and architecture.
Haven’t done a wedding in about 10 years. And that was a favor for a friend. Stopped including weddings in my portfolio back in the 90s. I leave that special kind of stress to the special kind of other pros, the Wedding Photographer.
I do some product (food) shots for work… I love it. I take them home (so I have all the time in the world). I set them in my ‘studio’. I set up my lights, my tripod, my camera and choose my lens. I take a handful of pictures and then load them up on photoshop. I can immediately decide what’s working and what’s not. I can move lights, I can rearrange the products, I can do things to reduce glare, I can swap out the lens, I can move the tripod back or forth, I can zoom in or out, I can stop the aperture up/down to change the DOF. Then, when I get the picture I want, I can Photoshop it to my heart’s content. What’s even better is that once I get one picture nailed, often times, it’s just a matter of dropping the rest of the products in to the same spot, taking, literally, ONE picture and PSing the same way. When the first picture might take an hour, subsequent ones (if they’re the same thing) might take a few minutes each. Products don’t move, they don’t complain, they just sit there and do nothing but let you take their picture.
On the other hand, if you see a falcon, you get one shot, hopefully you happen to have the right lens on your rig.
If you’re taking nature shots, you can’t burn daylight.
If you want sunrise pictures (I learned the hard way), you need to be out there at like 4:30 in the morning and you have about 10 minutes to get take them. Don’t like’em…go back out tomorrow with, hopefully, a solution for why they’re all purple or blown out or too dark.
Portraits, people don’t like being adjusted by an inch here or there. They’re all like ‘just take the picture’ and I’m like ‘but there’s a tree growing out of your head’ and I’m like ‘but it looks stupid’ and they’re like ‘I don’t care, just take the picture’.
Wedding photog…avoid it at all costs. The only times I’ve done it, I’ve requested that I don’t get paid. That way, my lack of ‘wedding photography’ skills balances out with them saving thousands of dollars.
But, BTW, if you do do wedding photography rent or buy a super fast lens. A good, prime (not off brand) 50mm, f/1.2. It’ll work great for general pics, but it’s how you get the ‘wow’ pictures like this and this.
I really like to look at photographs of people - either portraits or action shots. Maybe it’s due to my background in journalism like puly. I even like well-edited wedding photo books (as opposed to a dump of everything).
You’d think portrait and wedding photography would be more popular. Instant gratification from people who love your work. No having to find an audience or anything.
Speaking of wedding photography, now adays (is that a word?) you need two digital video cameras, at least two still cameras, assorted equipment that barely fits into a SUV, and most likely two or more assistants. All while remaining quietly in the background.
I realize the money is convenient and hopefully capturing the moments of that special day are, well…“special”. I loved the look when presenting folks with their wedding pictures and knowing they will be handed down to their kids and/or grand-kids.
All said and done, I would rather find a couple of squirrels, deer, birds, dogs or cats, street candids, junked cars with pot growing out of the back seat up through a busted-out rear window on a farm in the boonies, a man or woman walking down a dirt road, or (and I have done this) stones on the beach polished by decades of wave action.
However, sometimes the bride or groom’s grandma brings delicious munchies and homemade carrot cake with cold milk to chow down on with her in the kitchen/backroom/porch with entertaining conversation and that makes the day.
…I’m the complete opposite. I struggle with product photography. I don’t have the patience. I can’t “see the shot.” I hate spending time in post. I’m never ever ever happy with the final shot.
I love taking photos of people:candid or posed, sports, fashion, events, portraits. You can tell them to move to the right to get into the right light and they do it. I ask a box to move to the right and it just sits there, staring at me, mocking me. I’m too lazy to be a product photographer.
As a just random person that takes snapshots, I really love this thread! Over the years I’ve gotten better (usually of family, but some good naturey things.) And I’ve kept reading about how to get better light etc. With digital, you can throw out a lot and still once in a while get a wonderful photo.
I have a friend who has been doing some assistant work for wedding photography. (Carting stuff, etc.) The friend M, is a woman about 10 years older than me that I know seriously doesn’t put up with drama. I need to ask her how many Bridezillas she’s had to choke out. * (Her daughter recently got married and I think she was defraying costs.)
*Though she’s a very sensible very nice woman: I have seen her lose it at people who aren’t acting as a human should be acting.
A friend of mine is a photographer; he likes both people and our impact (urban landscapes, fields); one of the books he’s published is about the travels of Benjamín de Tudela and I’ve seen several shows which were all portraits. His commercial specialty is weddings, but you have to accept that it will be his way. If you want to get pictures of cackesmooshing, or to have them taken in the same spot everybody else goes to, he can give you the addresses of half a dozen other photographers, all of whom will be cheaper.
Landscapes work best with an object in the foreground to convey scale, but strictly speaking they are not really exciting to begin with. For that you have to add drama. Take one picture of a farm house in daylight and it looks okay but meh. Add dark skies and forked lightning, and you get an entirely different shot.
The point of any picture is that you are trying to convey something to the reader/viewer, and with landscapes/seascapes its about power, majesty , beauty, bleakness.
My proudest moment in photography was, as a tourist on a China trip, getting many beautiful empty shots of the forbidden city without people in them, it looks like I had my own run of the place after-hours Obsessive persistence, strategic climbing (amazing what standing on a bench can accomplish) and long lenses.
