Wedding Photography Tips – A Good Assistant Can Help Improve Overall Quality
Having a good assistant with you on a wedding shoot provides many benefits that can improve the quality of your finished images. First, an assistant on the shoot adds to your professionalism, and can help you in key ways for you to be more relaxed and more confident. Secondly, having an assistant to help you with your lighting makes it easier to change the direction of your main and fill lights. Lastly and most importantly, a lighting assistant is a person there to help you in case something goes wrong.
Having a lighting assistant with you on a shoot gives an air of professionalism to your business if you two can work together as a dedicated team. A way to do this is to make sure your photo assistant is always busy. This means your assistant is busy handing you a lens or filter or battery, busy setting up your lighting, busy making sure you didn't leave anything behind, etc. If you two work well together people will notice. This sense of teamwork shows that you two have plenty of experience working together and can focus on capturing some great images. Another way an assistant adds to your professionalism is that a good assistant can help take some of the stress off you, and you therefore appear more calm and confident. For example, I ask my assistants to have an eye for detail. This means that when I am posing people, my assistant looks for details (smooth out the groom's jacket, arrange the bride's dress nicely, make sure there is nothing on the ground in frame, etc.) Sometimes after I take a few pictures I realize all my camera settings are off and the pictures are not coming out the way I want. To take some of this stress of me I tell my assistant to look for details. As my assistant goes over and looks for small details with the bridal couple, I am busy figuring out what the problem is with my camera. Knowing the bridal couple is occupied, and not just standing around waiting for me to figure out the problem with my camera seems a lot less stressful on the wedding day.
Another way I use my assistant on a wedding shoot is to help me with the lighting. I shoot a lot of weddings on the beach, and need to use a lot of fill light depending on the time of day. I use my assistant like a living light stand. During the ceremony, we are moving around quietly, and I tell my assistant where to stand and where to point the strobes. This way I can directly control the lighting without having to move a light stand around every 30 seconds. Likewise, if we are inside I have him bounce the strobes. As I am setting up for a shot I just point to a wall or corner and tell my assistant to bounce the light so it lands where I need it to. Sometimes my assistant will be holding a handle with 3 strobes attached. Not having to worry about positioning these lights on a stand is a big plus for me. My assistant is also attentive to battery levels in all the strobes, one less thing I need to worry about.
Lastly, I see my assistant as a lifeline if something goes wrong. One time I was shooting some portraits of the couple, and one of my radio triggers for my strobe wasn't working. This trigger was essential to this portrait. I decided to continue to shoot pictures of the couple in a different spot with great directional natural light, while I left my assistant to see if he could fix the trigger. It turns out that he actually needed to open the trigger with a screwdriver and move something inside of it. He had it fixed by the time we got back. This is something I could not have taken the time to do myself. The couple did not even realize we had this problem. It just seemed natural to them to move around and change locations. A more serious problem happened on another occasion. On this day my camera stopped working early in wedding. I changed to my back up camera, which is a lower quality model, and quickly sent my assistant out in the car to borrow another camera body from a friend of mine who happened to live near by the wedding venue. He was back within half an hour, and I was able to shoot the majority of the wedding with the higher quality camera.
Good luck!
Having a lighting assistant with you on a shoot gives an air of professionalism to your business if you two can work together as a dedicated team. A way to do this is to make sure your photo assistant is always busy. This means your assistant is busy handing you a lens or filter or battery, busy setting up your lighting, busy making sure you didn't leave anything behind, etc. If you two work well together people will notice. This sense of teamwork shows that you two have plenty of experience working together and can focus on capturing some great images. Another way an assistant adds to your professionalism is that a good assistant can help take some of the stress off you, and you therefore appear more calm and confident. For example, I ask my assistants to have an eye for detail. This means that when I am posing people, my assistant looks for details (smooth out the groom's jacket, arrange the bride's dress nicely, make sure there is nothing on the ground in frame, etc.) Sometimes after I take a few pictures I realize all my camera settings are off and the pictures are not coming out the way I want. To take some of this stress of me I tell my assistant to look for details. As my assistant goes over and looks for small details with the bridal couple, I am busy figuring out what the problem is with my camera. Knowing the bridal couple is occupied, and not just standing around waiting for me to figure out the problem with my camera seems a lot less stressful on the wedding day.
Another way I use my assistant on a wedding shoot is to help me with the lighting. I shoot a lot of weddings on the beach, and need to use a lot of fill light depending on the time of day. I use my assistant like a living light stand. During the ceremony, we are moving around quietly, and I tell my assistant where to stand and where to point the strobes. This way I can directly control the lighting without having to move a light stand around every 30 seconds. Likewise, if we are inside I have him bounce the strobes. As I am setting up for a shot I just point to a wall or corner and tell my assistant to bounce the light so it lands where I need it to. Sometimes my assistant will be holding a handle with 3 strobes attached. Not having to worry about positioning these lights on a stand is a big plus for me. My assistant is also attentive to battery levels in all the strobes, one less thing I need to worry about.
Lastly, I see my assistant as a lifeline if something goes wrong. One time I was shooting some portraits of the couple, and one of my radio triggers for my strobe wasn't working. This trigger was essential to this portrait. I decided to continue to shoot pictures of the couple in a different spot with great directional natural light, while I left my assistant to see if he could fix the trigger. It turns out that he actually needed to open the trigger with a screwdriver and move something inside of it. He had it fixed by the time we got back. This is something I could not have taken the time to do myself. The couple did not even realize we had this problem. It just seemed natural to them to move around and change locations. A more serious problem happened on another occasion. On this day my camera stopped working early in wedding. I changed to my back up camera, which is a lower quality model, and quickly sent my assistant out in the car to borrow another camera body from a friend of mine who happened to live near by the wedding venue. He was back within half an hour, and I was able to shoot the majority of the wedding with the higher quality camera.
Good luck!
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