First, for the sake of simplicity, lets assume your wedding has a photographer booked for 8 hours. Thats 480 minutes and 960 half minutes. Why do I break the time down to 1/2 minutes? Because I normally shoot about 1000 pictures during an 8 hour wedding. That means I am shooting 1 picture every 30 seconds. That makes me one of the slower wedding shooter around. Why is that?
I am a stalker. I look for the moment to happen or I look for a moment that I’m pretty sure will happen soon. It’s like a sports shooter knowing that the runner at first is likely to steal second. Sometimes you can just feel the moment coming. And when it does, I am ready to shoot either available light or flash. I am mostly a flash kind of guy other then the ceremony. Most light looks bad on the bride or whomever I happen to be shooting. But just because I use flash, doesn’t mean my pictures look like I’ve used flash.
But when you use flash, you have to shoot slower. You need to capture the moment for if the moment happens 1 second later, your flash will not be ready to fire and you can kiss the shot goodbye.
But now you will ask, how do some photographers say they shoot 2000, 3000, or more shots in the same time period. The answer is that many photographers love the look of natural light and that requires very fast lens and very narrow depth of field (this means if your focus is off by as little as 1 foot, your subjects are very out of focus and for close-ups of the brides face, 1 eye can be in focus and the other out of focus). When you do this kind of photography, it is not uncommon to shoot as many shots as you can to make sure that at least 1 is in critical focus. That is why no matter how many shots a photographer takes, the bride rarely gets more than 500-1000 finished files and that is also why most natural light guys don’t want you to have all the out takes. It makes them look bad and honestly, even the great shooters cannot get even 50% in-focus beautiful pictures in the low light situations we work in, churches, reception halls with the lights down low or off, ect. So regardless which style your photographer shoots in, no flash or like me (when I think I need flash) in general you will get the same number of files at the end of the day. And if you hire a great photographer, your pictures will be great no matter what the style.
Michael Steinberg
