The Business of Beautiful Weddings

Here's a little secret we wish someone had told us when we were starting out: your first engagement session might be the most important shoot of your early career. Not because the photos have to be pe...

The getting-ready hour is the first thing you'll shoot on a wedding day, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. It's also the part that quietly trips up new photographers. The room is cramp...

Ask the internet how hard it is to become a wedding photographer and you'll get two useless extremes. One camp says "anyone can do it, just buy a camera!" The other says "it's brutally hard, you'll fa...

The dance floor lights drop, the DJ cranks the first song, and suddenly your camera, the one that made you look like a pro all afternoon, is hunting for focus and spitting out grainy, blurry frames. I...

The first look might be the most emotional five minutes of the entire wedding day. It's just the two of them (or a bride and her dad, or a couple and their closest friends), the quiet before the crowd...

You've got a full-time job, bills that need paying, and maybe a family counting on that steady income. You also have a growing itch to shoot weddings for real money. The dream is obvious; the logistic...

The ceremony is the one part of the wedding day you can't redo. The cake will still be there in ten minutes. The first dance can be nudged. But the vows, the ring exchange, that first kiss as a marrie...

The reception is winding down, the coordinator is handing out sparklers, and every guest is forming two wobbly lines by the door. This is it, the send-off. It's one of the most requested shots of the ...

There's a specific kind of doubt that shows up when you're eyeing a career change in your thirties or forties. You look at the young creatives flooding Instagram and quietly wonder if you've missed th...

Picture this: it's the morning of a wedding you've been looking forward to all month, you pull back the curtains, and the sky is the colour of wet concrete. Rain. On a wedding day. If your stomach jus...

Here's a moment almost every new wedding photographer misses.

The short answer: To shoot blue hour wedding portraits, work the 20-to-40-minute window just after sunset, expose for the deep blue sky f...

Nothing sends a new photographer down a spending spiral quite like the question of gear. You open one forum thread and suddenly you're convinced you need two $3,000 camera bodies, five lenses, and a l...