Oh yeah - I've encountered those types. At a church gig we did last year they went completely ape because we moved a mic stand AND when she tried to test the PA it wouldn't work because we switched it off at the wall. So we switched it back on for her to convince her it all worked but she was pretty huffy about the whole thing and insisted on testing it before she let us leave. As we were walking out the door I whistled a steady high-pitched tone, louder and louder, and (thinking it was feedback) the last thing I saw was her looking at the amplifier with absolute horror, trying to work out what the hell was wrong and how to stop it whistling.

Evil, but also strangely satisfying. Actually, it's a great gag to pull when someone's setting up any PA especially in an echoey building. In satisfaction terms, it's right up there with bursting a paper bag while someone's poking around in the innards of a power supply.

I have massive respect for anyone who has the courage to shoot weddings. Doubly so for those that shoot weddings on HDSLRs. That's something I'm never getting in to. I care too much about making people happy and never letting then down!

There was one wedding I had where after the ceremony ended, we realized the vows were not recorded to the portable recorder. We usually wire the groom up with a lav and hit record before the ceremony begins. It turns out that the groom said something really bad while chatting with his friends, and he tried to delete the recording himself. Of course, he didn't know how to operate the damn thing and he just ended up shutting it off. He never came up to us before the ceremony so basically we ended up with in-camera audio from the other side of the church which sounded like crap. I guess the lesson is, put an active taser in his pocket with the recorder so when he tries to touch it he learns a quick lesson.

Funny, in the same wedding when the couple arrived at the reception, the DJ said the wrong name for the groom (Jesse instead of Jason or something) and we got the bride's reaction to it. Pretty funny stuff, but yeah, weddings are a pain.

Props to you guys who are using HDSLR's for weddings though. I don't think I could do without the deep DOF and fast autofocus of traditional 1/3" 3 ccd cameras.

@mintcheerios What a bummer! I guess I need to have a backup plan for my groom Lav then. Maybe Laving the priest too, or setting up a mic close to the spot where they are going to stand?

I was shooting a wedding and the bridesmaids fought the whole time. I'd be filming and a cat fight would break out,... the bride yelled for me to stop recording,... while the best man signaled silently making the keep-rolling hand motion. funny stuff. Later at the same wedding the father of the bride broke a beer bottle on his table and went for the throat of one of the bridesmaid's husband. Got that on tape too, somewhere. The entire bride's side of the wedding reception walked out after that.

@johnnymossville would love to see the edit to this. I saw a highlight where the the zipper of the bride's dress broke off when they were attempting to zip up. 40mins later the Seamstress arrived and sewed it up, the best part of that highlight... the bride was chugging red wine from the bottle directly from the stress. This made it to the highlight, but still well told.

Jeeze! You should be shooting feature films. - But marraige is one of those, isn't it..:{

" I care too much about making people happy and never letting then down!"

what self indulgent crap! - so you're saying wedding shooters don't care! I'm amused by the number of people that comment disparagingly on shooting weddings simply because they haven't got the balls to shoot in a pressure situation.

Just shot an outdoor wedding with plenty of ambient noise, wind, guitar music playing through loudspeakers and so on. I decided to use my Sennheiser MKE300 shotgun mic with windsock to shoot the main angle of the ceremony and some interviews of the guests greeting the couple during the reception. I was a bit surprised the audio signal showed up very low on the audio bars on the GH2, but figured I could gain them up in post. This was my second shoot with the mic and I had good results with it previously.

Once back in editing I had no audio! The battery had drained and no signal was recorded, not even the GH2s own, since the mic input cancelled it. Result: I had to painstakingly sync up 50 minutes of recording to the LAV sound by eyeing frames and lipsyncing during the ceremony (thank god I had LAV-ed the groom) but the guests greetings were beyond repair. In the end I opted for just using the their smiles and them waving into camera with no sound and mixing in ambient sound from my B-cam placed further away.

Lesson learned: Always have a fresh battery in your microphone! I routinely do this with my Zoom H1:s and cameras but missed the Sennheiser since the run time is 300 hours (if you remember to turn the bloody thing off during shoots!) Another tricky thing is that the mic has no continous light showing it's ON, just a flashing light when you turn it on. And the GH2 will show ONE flashing bar of sound even if you have no incoming sound :(

This is the resulting highlight video. 3x GH2s with Cluster V6, Lumix 20, Lumix 14-140, Nokton 25 0.95 and Canon FD 50 1.4. Zoom H1 and Sennheiser MKE300 (not!) Edited in Vegas Pro 11 and graded in MB Looks 2. Music from www.musicbed.com

@artiswar Nice one! I like your intimate style with mostly closeups. The handheld shooting makes it different from most other productions. More edgy.

@artiswar Great work! I really need to break free fom my sticks :) What kind of setup du you have? Solo shooter?

@tired- FWIW I didn't take @Sangye 's comment as disrespectful. He even says

"I have massive respect for anyone who has the courage to shoot weddings. Doubly so for those that shoot weddings on HDSLRs."

I take his comment to mean he doesn't want to be put in the difficult position that event shooters do. Which I relate with 100%. I have done 4 weddings, the last of which was in 2009, and consider myslf lucky that I ended up doing more "Corporate" style work. It has it's own stresses but nothing like that of weddings and the like.

Cole