I'm in my 14th year as a wedding photographer. It's provided me with a reasonable living so I've never tried too hard to expand into other areas. However I find as I've just turned 50, I'm looking more seriously at what other avenues I should explore. Physically it's quite demanding, but also the trend seems to be going towards a generation brought up with digital, everyone's gone mad with terrible PS actions that I'm not prepared to follow, and as has been said, everyone with a DSLR and a web site is a wedding photographer now.
I've always been primeraly a natural light and candid/unposed photographer, with afew little posed sessions of 3-5 minutes plus half a dozen group shots.
Even winter and evening functions I'll mainly shoot without flash and never take studio flash, but I do take far too much equipment, really all I need are the Canon bodies and lenses from 16-200, including fast 35,50 and 85. That will cover everything I need, but I also take an M6 and 4 lenses, plus a swing lens panoramic, but they are all rather self indulgent on my part, the panoramic produces unique images, but no one would book me or not based on those, they're just a nice bonus for the client, I'd be quite happy to photograph whole weddings with Leica M's butI find SLR's just a little better suited to all the situations you come across at weddings, from moving subjects, occasional long lens use, and high iso capability.
I'm very experienced and like to think I'm quite good at what I do, I get commissioned a few times a year by Condé Nast for Brides magazine here in the UK, and I've photographed quite a few weddings for people who are photographers themselves or work in the fashion industry where there are a lot of photographers in the guest numbers, always slightly more pressured but it's quite a nice feather in your cap to get them.
I do shy away from looking too much at wedding photography or membership of any wedding forum or society, I find a lot of it all rather silly.
I do however get very defensive of the way wedding photographers have become the whipping boy for other photographers to mock. The number of times I've read about the non wedding photographer, who goes along as a guest and gets those shots that the main photographer is too busy to get, and the couple loved the prints more than the official photos. They then proceed to show the seven dull and unflattering images they've managed to get and you shudder to think what they didn't show.
Sorry if that sounds a little harsh, but there's a lot of implied, " I could shoot weddings really successfully, but it's too much of a compromise of my artistic vision", posts whenever weddings get mentioned. They're actually a difficult job to do well and require a lot more than competence with a camera. I think where a lot of photographers fall down is not understanding that one of the main requirements is they should be flattering, the lighting can be perfect and the composition great, but it's no good if the bridesmaid is laughing like a horse.
There, rant over. I feel better already.
