My turn to second shoot – Siobhan and Kevin

A month ago I joined the truly brilliant Christina Brosnan to be her second shooter.

Second shooting, to put it as basically as I can, is acting as a second photographer. For the second shooter it’s not a paid job. You do it purely to experiment, see how others work and hopefully learn something along the way.

This was my first time to act as second shooter (Christina second shot for me back in May which you can see on her blog here) and I totally loved it for several reasons. Firstly, you have zero pressure on your shoulders. You could in effect, come home with no photos and it wouldn’t matter – you’re not the official photographer. Secondly, it’s fun to shoot with someone else, bounce ideas off, see how they work and basically just have some company. And lastly, I was able to really get to grips with some of my lesser used equipment. Primarily my tilt shift lens. The tilt shift can be a bit of an awkward thing to use. Especially in a wedding scenario where timing is everything. So to use a tilt shift on the fly can be taking a bit of a gamble. So my oppourtunity as second shooter was the perfect opportunity to really get the most out of it. It was almost like a day of training. Training which has paid off as I’ve used the lens pretty extensively in every wedding since. It gives some wonderful results and forces your eyes to concentrate on particular parts of the image. I love that.

The wedding was that of Siobhan and Kevin who were a super couple who seemed to constantly smile and laugh there way through the day. That just makes our jobs so incredibly easy. (It’s still work though.. honest)