Two Photographers: What Are the Benefits
Every event from a photography perspective is a continuous sequence of moments which a photographer could capture. It is not possible for any human being to capture every second (unless you are video recording - but you can't put your video on the wall as a piece of art). Therefore you are looking for an experienced photographer, who knows what is coming, can anticipate the key moments which should not be missed.
But there are moments where things may be happening a little too fast even for an experienced photographer.
Benefits of the second photographer at the event:
- Extra set of eyes
- Eyes on the back of your head
- More time for photography
- Kill two birds with one (double-hit) stone
- Safety backup
Extra set of eyes
Life is unpredictable and so is the event you want to have captured. Rare moments, which you will treasure the most will happen without prior warning. If there are two professionals with cameras looking for those moments, the chances are 100% higher that those special moments will not go uncaptured.
I could compare a photographer to a car driver. As you are aware, every car has dangerous blind spots. You can't get rid of them completely, however, the second professional photographer significantly helps to cover a big portion of the blind area.
Eyes on the back of your head
Photo-worthy moments are happening simultaneously. In those situations, the photographer who is alone at the event has no other choice than to pick and choose one scene as the priority and hope that whatever is happening behind his back is less important.
This is not a dilemma for two photographers.
Situations of two important things happening at once are not rare.
Picture a wedding - the bride is kissing her new husband for the first time and her proud father who is always unemotional will for a rare few seconds, let emotions take over before he quickly wipes his happy tears to go back to "normal". One photographer will probably focus on photographing your "must-have" kissing shot - because it is expected. With two photographers you have a higher chance to get rare moments like the bride's fathers tears.
More time for photography
It is very easy during an event for a photographer to get overwhelmed with "must-have shots". If the photographer is alone for everything, he can be clicking fast like a happy-snapper hoping to quickly get things done and tick of that list. Quality photography needs time, not just experience and if the workload split between two people the client can benefit from the results.
Kill two birds with one (double-hit) stone
This is simple math - if you have a big group of guests as the event and you would like to have more of them captured for your future memories, two photographers will simply go through the crowd faster and cover more ground than one person.
Safety backup
Do you know Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong'?
News flash - during your photography event something could go wrong every second. Even with your photographer - if you hire one. Equipment is breakable, including camera bodies, lenses can be dropped, batteries can die and sim cards can be full at critical moments, humans including photographers can trip, fall, get sick, get injured. The probability that two photographers will get sick at your event at the same time is reasonably low. If the lens falls accidentally from a photographers clumsy hands, there will be always backup if you choose two.
To set the expectation right - we always work together as a team and we provide in our packages an approximate number of images per hour. The benefit of two professionals is not double the number of images, in our case, it's focusing on quality and a variety of images to tell the full story of your event.
We focus on producing what we promise in a manner that is comfortable for us to be able to deliver the standard we want for our clients.
One more sentence about this topic - Of course, every photographer can miss some good moments and there is no guarantee that two people will not miss anything, the point is that the risk of missing something important for you is cut in half if you hire a team of two.