How to Second Shoot: Common Second Shooting Mistakes (H&S’s Guide to Second Shooting Pt. 6)
December 14, 2023
Hey photographer friends! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! Today, we’re continuing our blog series all about second shooting and how it can help photographers grow their wedding photography businesses. Even if they’re brand new to weddings! Last week, we shared some tips about how to learn from your lead photographer while second shooting.
This week, we’re going to get into the specifics of how to second shoot. After second shooting for other photographers (and having other photographers as third shooters and assistants for us), we’ve picked up on a few dos and don’ts that will make the day go more smoothly for everyone!
DON’T be on your phone or represent the lead photographer poorly
This is one of our biggest pet-peeves when it comes to HOW to second shoot. We hate when we see our Apprentices scrolling on their phones during a wedding day! Even though wedding photography is one of the most fun jobs in the world, it is still a job. And we hope you wouldn’t scroll Instagram in front of your boss while working! If there’s a down moment on a wedding day, ask your lead how you can be helping. If there’s actually nothing to be done (a rare occurrence), then review some images on your camera, or take this opportunity to ask your lead photographer some good questions.
But when you pull out your phone and start scrolling through Instagram, you’re communicating to everyone around you — your lead, the bride and groom, their bridesmaids and groomsmen and family — that you’re bored. It’s rude. It comes off as lazy and disinterested. And it represents your lead photographer poorly. When your livelihood comes from your personal brand like it does for most wedding photographers, representing them poorly is a great way to guarantee you’ll never be invited back.
Of course, there are moments when you want to snap a BTS video with your iPhone camera, or check the day-of-timeline on your phone, or give your lead or another member of the wedding team a call. But even those moments should be minimized, and done privately, if at all possible!
DO add value by taking behind-the-scenes photos of them
Whether it’s with your camera or even just a quick iPhone video, behind-the-scenes content is something your lead literally cannot take without you. Most of the day, you’ll be focused on capturing the same subject as your lead, but from another angle. But every now and then, don’t be afraid to take a few steps back, and capture your lead photographer(s) in action.
Whether for the “about us” section of their website, or just a quick post on social media, we can almost guarantee your lead will find a way to use these images! We know from experience that posting the occasional behind-the-scenes photo of Hunter and I working together on a wedding day gets great engagement from our followers. Plus it means we get to post the occasional Behind the Scenes blogs!
DON’T post photos and act like they’re from your own weddings
Here’s a tip for how to second shoot that doesn’t involve the wedding day at all! Don’t post photos from a second shooting job and pretend like they’re from your own weddings. Of course, we understand that a big perk of second shooting is the ability to build your portfolio. You get to add images to your website and social media that you otherwise wouldn’t have captured! And we encourage our Apprentices to use images from our weddings as they build their business and book their first weddings by themselves.
But we also make it very clear that honesty is important to us. When they post photos that they took on our weddings, we ask them to make it clear that they shot it while assisting us. And when we assist our mentor photographer Eric Kelley, we make sure to do the same.
When you exaggerate your own work, experience, and importance in order to appear more professional, or book jobs that wouldn’t have booked you if you spoke openly and honestly, it’s called aggrandizing. Although not technically illegal, it’s an unethical business practice, and one that’ll likely catch up with you in the end. Honesty is always the best policy, and if you lie or aggrandize to your potential clients and they find out, it’ll do far more harm than not booking the job in the first place.
DO sync your timestamps at the beginning of the day
One of our favorite tips for how to second shoot is all about your camera’s internal clock. This might seem like a pretty minor thing, but it’s one that your lead photographer and their post-production team will thank you for immensely! At the beginning of the wedding day, everyone should pull out any cameras that they’ll be shooting with. Find the “time and date” setting in your camera’s menu options and synchronize your timestamps, down to the second. Although it’s easy to fix differences in time zones in Lightroom, you can only make adjustments in intervals of one hour. If a wedding day is off by a couple of minutes, it can make culling and editing really annoying!
Why is this annoying? When we shoot a wedding day, Hunter and I each typically use two camera bodies, plus our apprentice’s camera makes five. Imagine culling and editing the ceremony, when everyone’s cameras are off of each other by a minute or two. First the father is handing the bride off to the groom, then the bride is walking down the aisle? Next the bridesmaids are walking down the aisle, then the bride is walking down the aisle… again? It makes for a jumbled mess that can only be fixed by dragging and dropping photos into the correct order, which is a long and painstaking process.
DON’T assume you’ll be invited back
Most photographers who hire second shooters or assistants have a short list of favorite photographers that they like to work with. If you’re working with a lead for the first time, you’ll have to earn the right to be on that short list!
Everything else in this blog series should hopefully help you make sure that you end up getting asked back! But if all else fails, do your best to serve your lead photographer first. Serve the couple second. And serve yourself and your portfolio last. If you do those three things, in that order… you’ll be fine 😉
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