Bane: Photographers

WTF is up with wedding photographers?

In my line of work, I've worked with many, many photographers and the vast majority (that is to say, about 80%) of them range from being pretty cool to very cool people.

Every once in a while I get a real stinger. I'm talking about photogs that constantly ruin my video by way of ignorance or malice or just plain selfishness. At one end of the spectrum is the oblivious photog that will wander into my shot because he simply doesn't know where I am or have a good sense of his surrounding. (I say "he" because most—with the exception of one—female photographers are all pretty conscientious) At the other end of the spectrum is the prima donna that thinks he is the reason the bride and groom are getting married. Like they are getting married so they can have an excuse to work with this clown and they're throwing a party to celebrate his hiring. What egomaniacs!

This last weekend I shot a wedding in Sacramento where the photographer (I think he leans toward the shallow end of the spectrum) who was a pleasant guy but kept walking in front of the bride and groom in between the Reverend's sentences. What normal thinking person with even an ounce of respect for circumstance and an iota of proper decorum would think it is OK to across the front of an ongoing ceremony of this caliber? Would you stand at the foot of a movie screen at your local Cineplex? Would you saunter between two people talking to each other in a hotel lobby? Who does this sort of thing? It's socially retarded is what it is!

And during the sand-pouring ceremony the guy goes in for the kill shot and blocks not only my camera but the eyes of half of the attending guests. I had no choice but to dismount my camera from its tripod and sneak in between his size 64 waist and the gazebo's entrance for the shot.

Sometimes I want to leave the footage of the photog's back in the final edited movie so the bride can see what I had to contend with and earn justification for any shots I might have missed because of it. "Perhaps", I yearn, "the bride will call up the photog after seeing the footage and give him a piece of her mind." Alas, it is too passive aggressive to punish the bride with sub-par footage in her video for me to actually leave that stuff in.

Inevitably, I am forced to spend extra time editing around this clod so that I can purposely hide from the bride the notion that her photographer was the single most influential factor in preventing me from getting the best possible shot!