A co-worker has asked you to take pictures at her wedding, and you want to do the best job possible. They may have decided a professional photographer is too expensive and instead are relying on you to take pictures for them.

You feel the pressure, and want to make sure you don’t mess up. Here are the top hints and tips from Jim Whitesell, a wedding photographer in Edmonton:

1. Use the best equipment possible

A small point-and-shoot camera is fine for capturing family memories, but doesn’t do as well as a digital SLR with an external flash. The focus time, shutter delay, and limited reach of the small built-in flash will all cause problems for you. If you do not own or have access to a digital SLR camera and external flash, you can probably rent them from a camera store. Be sure to test and practice with the camera before the wedding day! A professional will likely have multiple lenses as well, but this is often beyond the ability of a casual shooter.

2. Take at least two memory cards

Although it doesn’t happen often, memory cards can fail. Keeping an extra card with you is cheap insurance that will keep you shooting if your card does quit working. Be sure the cards are of ample size so you don’t run out of space half-way through the night. 4GB is the minimum size you should have with you.

3. Batteries, batteries, batteries

Be sure to charge the camera batteries the night before, and preferably have a second battery charged and ready. Most external flash units use AA batteries so have a couple extra sets of these, too.

4. Attend the rehearsal

Taking pictures at the rehearsal is the best way to be prepared for the pictures you’ll take at the actual ceremony. You’ll have a feel for where to position yourself for the best shots. While a professional wedding photographer won’t usually shoot at the rehearsal, they will often show up to not only reassure the bride and groom that they are prepared for the next day but also to scope out the building. Their experience will enable them to know where the best shots are just by seeing the facility.

5. Posing the bridal party

When taking formal pictures of the bridal party, pay attention to the details. Make sure everyone’s face is visible, and pay attention to the placement of hands and feet. Pleasing poses are important.

6. Photographing the ceremony

If the wedding will take place inside a church, you’ll need to shoot the ceremony without flash. Use a tripod to hold the camera steady or camera shake caused by longer exposure times will likely ruin the pictures.

7. Shooting the reception

If possible, try to get a shot or two of the reception hall before everyone arrives. Takes some shots of other details, too – like the head table decorations, cake, etc. Once things are underway, it’s always nice to go table-to-table and get pictures of all the guests.

8. Shoot the details

Take pictures of the little details. The rings, bridal bouquet, ring bearer, flower girl, bride’s shoes, etc. are all great details to capture and the bride will be quite pleased to have these.

9. Capture the fun

There are always fun, unplanned moments that make each wedding unique and memorable. Always have your camera ready to capture the moment!

10. Back up the photos

As soon as possible after the wedding, burn all the original images to a CD or DVD for safekeeping. Do this before you make any changes to them. If you accidentally delete an important picture or have a computer failure you’ll still have the originals to fall back on. Even a professional low cost wedding photographer will make backups.

Your friends have entrusted you with a very important task. The pictures are the best way to remember the wedding and all the fun details. While a professional wedding photographer will do a better job, brides and grooms on a budget may not have the ability to pay for one.

If you aren’t confident you can do a good job, why not suggest you pay for all or part of a professional photographer’s fee as your gift to the bride and groom? And if you just happen to be near Edmonton, Alberta, please check out Jim Whitesell’s website for Edmonton wedding photos.

It is easy to make a dorky web page. It’s also easy to make a very nice, clean, professional-looking web page even if you don’t have much design experience. Often the difference, even for beginning designers, is simply a matter of eliminating certain features that are guaranteed to make a page look amateurish. I’ve been going through the list of things that people – designers and non-designers – from around the country have cited as the things that make the difference between a well-designed and a poorly designed web page.

Here’s a list of ten additional design elements that will increase the usability of virtually all sites:

1. Place your name and logo on every page and make the logo a link to the home page (except on the home page itself, where the logo should not be a link: never have a link that points right back to the current page).
2. Provide search if the site has more than 100 pages.
3. Write straightforward and simple headlines and page titles that clearly explain what the page is about and that will make sense when read out-of-context in a search engine results listing.
4. Structure the page to facilitate scanning and help users ignore large chunks of the page in a single glance: for example, use grouping and subheadings to break a long list into several smaller units.
5. Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, infinite page, use hypertext to structure the content space into a starting page that provides an overview and several secondary pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to allow users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don’t concern them.
6. Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product family pages with lots of photos. Instead have a small photo on each of the individual product pages and link the photo to one or more bigger ones that show as much detail as users need. This varies depending on type of product. Some products may even need zoomable or rotatable photos, but reserve all such advanced features for the secondary pages. The primary product page must be fast and should be limited to a thumbnail shot.
7. Use relevance-enhanced image reduction when preparing small photos and images: instead of simply resizing the original image to a tiny and unreadable thumbnail, zoom in on the most relevant detail and use a combination of cropping and resizing.
8. Use link titles to provide users with a preview of where each link will take them, before they have clicked on it.
9. Ensure that all important pages are accessible for users with disabilities, especially blind users.
10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to work the same on your site. Remember Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience: users spend most of their time on other sites, so that’s where they form their expectations for how the Web works.