When I tell people—even photographers—that I do weddings, I often get looks and reactions suggesting I’m in need of an emergency brain transplant. That in and of itself stands as acknowledgement of how challenging and—in some ways—undesirable taking on a wedding can be. All the more reason why I scratch my head as to how people can conceive that a photographer with the skills to pull off a wedding should take a vow of poverty.

What skills, you say? Let’s start with the inter-personal ones, like dealing with often drunk, sometimes antagonistic, distracted and disruptive people to somehow corral them to pose in a photo that someone will actually want to hang on a wall. If that’s not enough, how about having to diffuse ongoing, long-festering family squabbles in hopes folks will be civil enough to set them aside for a few seconds while they grin at my camera.

From the photography end of things, a wedding photographer has to be a jack of all trades and master of most of them. And whatever he faces he will have to accomplish at breakneck speeds because a wedding never stops for him to catch his breath. It all happens now and thirty seconds ago. If he sees it happening, too late—he missed it.

He will be an action/sports photographer on the dance floor or when something is happening in a hurry. He will be a studio/portrait photographer, often setting up complex lighting arrangements to pull off large and small group formal portraits. These he has to get done on the double. People are itching to move onto the next, funner thing. He will be a photojournalist, ever sensing, ever anticipating those key moments before they happen. He will be a landscape photographer to capture beautiful sweeping views of outdoor grounds, and he will be an architecture photographer to capture striking interior and exterior shots of the wedding’s location.

Above all, he will be a master of light. He’ll get you a decent to amazing shot in any light you throw at him, whether it’s full blast, midday sunlight, overcast, partial shade, indoor lighting, or made lighting from artificial sources he sets up and controls. It’s no wonder many respected photographers have at some point cut their teeth in wedding photography. It doesn’t just pay the bills. It forces you to explore and master many of the skills you can use in just about any other type of photography.

In the end, though, if you find yourself shooting a wedding, I hope you’re there because you have a heart for it. Because you love it and what it represents. Because you get that above all other days a wedding springs forth a rush of emotions, both positive and negative, that in turn engender a long train of unique, once in time moments tailor-made for the camera’s ability to capture and freeze an image that portrays these special instants.

That’s what I felt when I first got started in wedding photography. The feeling lasted through the first ten or so weddings I did. Then the reality of it hits you and embitters you. You see how people want to pay you starvation wages because they think they can do just as well with a cellphone. You realize that all the special moments get degraded down to just another big, obscenely expensive party. All the makeup, and the clothing, and the decorations—all of it starts adding to a lot of make-believe. That’s when it happens. All the artistry and decisive moment capture devolves into one more job, a way to pay the bills, and not very steadily, and not very rewardingly, financially or otherwise.

That’s why after each of my last three weddings I’ve told myself, not one more. Then came another booking, with the implied ability to pay for this or that, and you take it, at the end of which you tell yourself the same thing. This is my last one.

As far as I am concerned, I will obey that decision this time. Even though summer’s upon me, the hot wedding season, I don’t have any more bookings, and that’s just fine. My fine art side of the business seems to be picking up, as last night’s show suggests. If I figure out a way through this Ernesto-Vivian gauntlet I might squeeze out a nice payday, and maybe that National Geographic opportunity I explored over lunch yesterday will pan out. Or I could get a real job so I can hop on a jammed up freeway every morning for the privilege of voluntary incarceration in an office cube.

Or maybe, between Ernesto, Vivian and Nicko, all of that adds up to nothing but a long string of moot points that look an awful lot like bullet holes.

Thanks for reading!

For this week’s #SaturdayScenes sample, I went back to one of my published novels, Decisive Moment. This passage comes with far more narrative than I usually use, but it builds on some of my experiences (as, yes, a wedding photographer) to provide some internal grounding for what the protagonist is going through. It also lets me vent some of my frustrations with wedding photography, which apparently, my protagonist shares.

As always, let me know what you think. And if it piques your interest, you might want to check out the published novel.