I've only shot one wedding (and that was under duress). Fortunately, it was a non-traditional wedding. No wait, it was very traditional, but it was a mix of Vietnamese and Cambodian traditions, so it wasn't any tradition that I knew anything about. Despite the fact that the wedding ceremony was bilingual, I was confused almost the entire time. My problem was that I didn't speak either Vietnamese or Cambodian.
Every time I turned around the bride, who was very beautiful, was in a different outfit. Most of the outfits were very shiney. The groom was in a dark tux. I remember that I seemed to never have enough dynamic range to cover the both of them. Obviously, I metered for her dresses and gave up on detail in his tux. Blown highlights are uglier than deep shadows and everyone looks at the bride's clothes and not the grooms anyway.
To make matters worse, the wedding was in the bride's parents house and it was filled with all these Vietnamese and Cambodian relatives with lots of expensive cameras. Fortunately most of them were only Nikons, so I didn't have any real competition.
The ceremony invovled a lot of strange stuff. People pulled stuff off of some plants and started throwing it everywhere. People walked around the bride and groom like a game of musical chairs and kept pretending to cut their hair. At one point the parents started monologuing and the bride and groom both started crying. Oh, and there were candles and incess all over the place. So along with everything else, I was having to deal with bright flames and smoke in the frame all the time.
To top it off, I'm a Texas Aggie and the wedding was in the heart of Oklahoma Sooner country. In another room in the house, there was a big crowd watching the OU/A&M football game (trust me, this was an unusual wedding) and A&M was getting killed. They ended up losing 77-0. It was brutal.
The reception was western style dress, but at a vietnamese restaurant. They were serving fish with the heads still on. I remember that the restaurant seemed impossibly dark and the ceilings were miles above. The only light I had at the time was the 420EX flash on my camera. It didn't really have the juice to bounce. I think I ended up shooting manual at f/4 and 1/125 and I let the flash handle the exposure. It gave me the best balance of lighting on my subject and still showing my background. I used ISO 1600 (which was awfully grainy on a D60) but the grain fit the mood, so it was OK.
I'm still not sure how I survived the whole thing. I started shooting at about 8:00 AM and didn't finish until 11:00 PM that night. I went through an incredible number of flash batteries, camera batteries, and memory cards. I only had two memory cards, so I'd pop one in my laptop and dump it while I shot with the other. I had four batteries (two at a time in the portrait grip), so I'd charge one set while I shot with the others. The flash batteries (AA) got slow to recharge after about 30-50 shots, so I popped them out and slammed in a new set. I think I ended up with about 32 slightly used AA batteries from that day.
I'll never shoot another wedding.
