How To Prepare for Day of Wedding Photography

Finely tuned preparation is critical to successful wedding photography, particularly if you want to avoid unnecessary stress on the big day. Wedding photographer and Fuji ambassador John Branch IV runs you through how he gets ready for a couple’s big day.

Branch has a number of tips that will make the wedding day itself run more smoothly and if there’s one aspect that I’d stress, it’s the need to make sure that you don’t find yourself formatting memory cards while shooting. The first wedding I ever shot (as a favor to a friend with a tight budget) saw me hurriedly swapping out cards about two hours into the day, formatting the replacement card before I got back to work. I started shooting again and somehow knew that I’d made a mistake. A quick check showed that in my rush, I somehow swapped the cards twice, putting the card I’d already used back in my camera and immediately formatting it.

Fortunately, I realized and file recovery software was able to retrieve the now-deleted files. I couldn’t be sure until I got back to my computer and so spent the rest of the day feeling sick inside at the thought that I may have lost a whole card’s worth of photographs of my friend's wedding day. Not fun.

What tips would you add? Let us know in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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