I wake up – usually in a premier inn – and the nerves immediately kick in.
Gulp… I have to shoot a wedding today.
This used to happen in my first year and it still happens now in what will be my 13th year of shooting weddings.
So that’s another myth successfully kiboshed. Experienced photographers get nervous too. Not quite a t-shirt worthy slogan but I think people mistakenly think that nerves only happen earlier in your career. It’s not true. It happens to most of us.
End of email.
Not really. I do have some stuff I think about and ways that I try to circumnavigate these irrational thoughts that cause the nerves.
What causes your wedding day nerves? I’ll tell you mine but it’s worth really trying to work out what you’re thinking could go wrong. Once you do that you can work on stuff to help you find some coping mechanisms. I’ve boiled my nerves mostly down to these three thoughts:
Notice there’s no worry about doing a ‘bad job’. I’ll write a future email about why I think it’s very easy to just please your clients, so I don’t worry about taking photos that are ‘good enough’ for my clients. I guess that partly is to do with having over a decade of happy clients behind me and knowing that if necessary there’s lightroom and photoshop and retouchers in the world. So if that is something you worry about then just know that caring enough to be nervous about doing a good job means you will always do enough to please your clients, as long as you care and you’ve got your eye to the camera and you’re pressing the button.
So let’s talk about those three specific self-doubts that cause most of my nervousness…
This is definitely my biggest worry ahead of a wedding. I’m a textbook introvert at heart and I can be incredibly socially awkward and I really, really want people to like me. So having to walk into a room of people, most of whom I’ve never met, and make a good first impression is beyond daunting for me.
I feel like I have to break through this barrier when I arrive at prep, again during group photos and sometimes even again during portraits. Basically any time I have to talk out loud!
Over the years I’ve found the solution is simply to be yourself, confidently. Behave like you would behave in a room full of friends and you’re golden.
I struggle more with the guys than the girls at prep time because I think my complete lack of coolness is more obvious and groups of guys can be more judgemental. Last year I arrived to shoot the prep for a bunch of cool, wealthy, good looking guys. I’d never met them either, so my inferiority complex nerves were through the roof. I walked into the hotel room and confidently introduced myself as I always do. In the room there was a piano, so I pressed a few keys. The groom asked if I could play… I said I could play one song – walking in the air, from the snowman – and he said ‘go on then’. So I sat there and somehow played the only song I know for these strangers.
Did they think it was cool? No of course not, I’d played them a soft piano piece from a cartoon most of them hadn’t seen, but now they’d met **me**.
These nerves usually come from thinking you need to be exactly like your clients, which is impossible especially if you’re doing a lot of weddings for a variety of people. So I find just committing to being yourself is the key to building that all important quick rapport. The more you do this and the more you feel like you can just show up and be yourself, the easier it gets to shut down this particular cause of nerves.
If you don’t get this particular one it’s going to sound ridiculous. And it’s not a worry about coming home with no photos. I know I’ll take photos. It’s the worry that I’ll come home with boring photos of nothing.
I don’t have a solution for this one other than to tell myself that “nothing” never happens at weddings.
This improved when I stopped entering and looking at awards, just to follow on from last week’s email. Awards, especially documentary awards, are a collection of the rare weird and wonderful moments that happen at weddings. You can’t aim for that. You can only be ready with the camera to your eye. The awards which impress me most nowadays are when people are able to capture something ‘normal’ in an unusual or interesting way.
Weddings, fundamentally, are a collection of low key but beautiful moments. Smiles, touches, tiny moments of connection. At least that’s how I personally see them. And when this question pops into my head and causes nerves I just tell myself that if I go there, and connect myself to the people and the occasion, I’ll capture these quieter but priceless moments.
And I’ll try to be ready for the louder, more unusual, ‘award worthy’ moments if they happen. But if they don’t, they don’t. The clients aren’t there to live up to other people’s weddings, and I shouldn’t be there to live up to other people’s photos.
This particular worry has also subsided since I turned a blind eye to the awards bubble. But I’ll talk about it anyway as it’s still there — I do feel like I still have a reputation to live up to, and that carries its own personal pressure.
I once arrived at a wedding, only to be introduced OVER THE MICROPHONE at the rehearsal dinner to all the guests as the “sixth best wedding photographer in the world”. I had just finished 6th in an ISPWP contest and blogged about it but talk about pressure!
I have enough imposter syndrome just being seen as “a photographer” so being expected to create “the best wedding photos in the world” sent my imposter syndrome through the roof.
So what did I do? I did what I always do when this question pops into my head, and I talked to myself like I talk to my kids. I can’t take the 6th best photos in the world (nobody can) but all I can do is try my best and try my hardest to do the best job I can.
Before I finish I just want to talk a tiny bit more about this expectations thing. I used to struggle with this too, and I realised I was assuming that my clients were expecting me to create other people’s photos. I was seeing all this cool stuff all over instagram, facebook and everywhere else that was super cool and I was thinking I had to go to weddings and not just create my style of work, but also everybody else’s style of work. The cool off camera flash portraits, the quirky poses of certain Mexican photographers, the fine art finish of high end film photographers etc etc etc.
I thought if I wasn’t doing everything every other photographer was doing, I was short changing my clients.
Be very clear to yourself about what your style and approach is, and be very clear with your clients about what your style and approach is and stop trying to read minds. Once you do this, the nerves and pressure around expectations all but disappears.
So as you can hopefully see, I do still get nervous before almost every wedding, but I’ve become better at working out where the nerves are coming from and trying to rationalise them and work through them. Or explicitly set my client’s expectations so I don’t create the added pressure of not knowing what they’re expecting.
I still struggle to eat or hold a conversation on the morning of a wedding as I overthink the day ahead but I’ve managed to improve from the days of throwing up in a premier inn bathroom!
I hope this helps you deal with your own wedding day nerves, and thanks for reading!
Adam
PS – I didn’t talk about weather despite it being topical with all the recent storms. I stopped looking at weather forecast for wedding days a long time ago, and I don’t feel the pressure to do ‘rain shots’ at wet weddings any more either. That’s not to say I wouldn’t take them if it felt appropriate or worth it, but I stopped believing that “rain shots must be taken at rainy weddings”. All you can do with the weather is roll with it, work with it, or ignore it. So definitely don’t worry about it.
