A friend of mine is intrigued by wedding photography and placed an ad in Kijiji offering a free engagement shoot, and then offered a bargain rate wedding package to a couple who took him up on the offer. Out of curiosity and definitely not out of aspirations to be a wedding photographer, I offered to be a second shooter all day long. Next thing I know, I'm showing up at a stranger's house to shoot the groom and groomsmen as they prepared. Then I'm at the wedding assigned to the back of the hall to shoot the wedding party as they enter with wide angle shots on one camera. Then I'm shooting long shots down the aisle with my 70-200 at ISO 5000 on another camera so I don't have to use flash. After the ceremony, we adjourned to eat and prepare a slide show of the ceremony to be screened at the reception.
Then off to the reception to basically shoot whatever we want/can. I used my 70-200 with bounce flash most of the time which seemed to capture unobtrusively as possible. I also set up a photo booth where people could put on crazy costumes and crazy poses and have their picture taken by a "professional" photographer. One guy insisted on raising his arms to hug his girlfriend, but when I reviewed the photos, I saw his sweaty armpits wound up in the picture. I insisted on a reshoot. Funny what you don't notice at the moment. I used a wide angle lens on my 7D to accommodate the various groupings, used my tripod but kept the flash on camera for the sake of convenience. Most of those shots turned out well exposed and sharp.
It was fun most of the time. Long day. An exercise in versatility and flexibility and resourcefulness. Great experience. Now it's up to my friend to process the 1000 or so photos we took between us. One picture of the bride and her father I liked: