Shawn gets to come out and play now…a couple from their first look, and then the ketuba ceremony. I really loved the cantor who did their wedding. Affable, joyous, welcoming, inclusive, good with the kids. A quality officiant who truly shares the joy of the occasion makes such a great difference in a wedding. A great officiant conveys the idea that this is an emotional bond, not a legal one.
More wishes for happiness to Shawn and Kim!
After a rainy week, the skies dried up and gave us a bit of sunshine for Kim and Shawn’s center city Philadelphia wedding. A little bit of bridal prep at the hotel, a first look down in South Philly, portraits here and there around town, and back to the hotel for an elegant reception.
I am always so thankful when families are involved, gracious, and easy to work with. Kim and Shawn’s wedding was an excellent example of this…it moves the day right along, keep everyone calm, and most importantly, people look as if they are having a pleasant time in the photographs.
Here are a few from the day; more will follow!
Congratulations to Najah and Quincy! This short and sweet wedding ceremony and portrait session took us from the Mercury Pavilion, behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art, down to Love Park in Center City. I love watching the pre-wedding tension fall away as rings and vows are exchanged, and then just being with a couple that first hour after the ceremony, as the emotion are still so fresh and the idea of what and who they have just committed themselves to is starting to gain traction. Najah and Quincy were right up this alley.
So a quick question: how much time to do you need to get good wedding photography?
The answer is about 1/125 of a second. Sure, I always love unbounded periods of time to work with couples, but the fact is, that time is sort of like film: I actually enjoy the boundary of knowing that I have to work efficiently, that I can’t just shoot and shoot and shoot. I like the little bit of pressure involved in having to fit portraits into twenty or thirty minutes. It means I have to know what I want to shoot, and that I have to communicate that clearly to the couple. I can’t spend a whole bunch of time finding an interesting background to prop up an otherwise uninteresting pose or exposure; I have to focus on the couple and the relationship, and gesture, and expression. All the things that matter. When you are forced to play within the rules, you get better, because you have to pay better attention.
Give me beautiful light and a couple of constraints, and I am a happy man. Add in a beautiful couple, and it’s about as good as it gets.
All images shot on a Bronica ETR-Si and Kodak Portra 160 film
Oh, the pain of the photographer who works at a wonderful venue for a couple who asks that their images not be used online! That is the way of the world these days, though, and privacy requests must be respected. Congratulations to the wonderful couple, and thank you so much for having me work with you twice at an amazing location: The Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. In addition to this location being a labyrinth of eye-candy nooks and crannies and little passage ways and wonderful backdrops, it also is home to a world-class restaurant, Rats, who served me a vendor meal so good I had to go home and try to cook it myself. I came close.
So instead of sharing with you some images from this excellent couple, I’m just going to show some other images I have taken at The Grounds on other occasions, and I’ll ruminate on why location both is and isn’t important to wedding photography, and what you should consider when considering the privacy of your images.
We photographers love rich settings, places that are textural and have interesting lines and vivid colors and something that is new. But there is a danger in these locations as well: the photography can become about the textures and the lines and the colors, rather than about the wedding and the couple. The Grounds for Sculpture is a wonderful place to work, because there is so much going on visually. But at the same time, I found myself having to kind of ignore everything that was great to look at, because that is not what the pictures were supposed to be. I was photographing a couple, not a venue. Environmental portraiture wants to take both into account, of course, and the best photography gives a sense of time and place as well as personality. I got some really wonderful shots while there, but at the same time, one of my favorite images from this year was taken on a sidewalk in a run-down neighborhood of Philadelphia, against the wall of an industrial building. The setting there wasn’t great, and the image instead had to rely solely on gesture on relationship. It’s a good image.
I love a good backdrop just as much as the next photographer, but it does need to be remembered that an exotic location is not always the best backdrop, and where you have your location portraits done will say something about you…it might be a location of great personal importance, or maybe it’s just a great place, or maybe just a red wall in a not-so-great place. Everything brings something to your images. I just try not to be seduced by the beauty of a place when am trying to take great pictures of people.
And privacy: I have written about this before. We in the digital world constantly walk the fine line between appropriate sharing and sharing too much. I have even run into people who have the belief that, if it is not posted, it didn’t happen. While this might be true in a documentary, public sense, we know that it is not true in a personal, private sense. The whole point of hiring a professional photographer for a wedding is so that someone who is technically and artistically competent, as a minimum standard, and interestingly expressive as a basic, reasonable expectation, can create an evocative historical document of a key life event. Your wedding photography is the first heirloom of your new family, and it is important that it is done well. Who that is shared with is an intensely personal decision.
As a photographer, and as a business person, I have a direct and urgent need to use my current work on blogs, social media, and portfolio sites to show couples how I go about documenting and presenting their visual memoirs. But that marketing need does not supersede, ever, the wishes of the couple to be more or less private in their affairs. Many couples welcome the sharing of their photos because, you know what?, they look great in them and they want to share images of themselves in their great, fresh happiness with a widely cast net of friends current and past, co-workers, professional networks, and the like. Others might want that sharing to be limited to the much more intimate experience of sitting next to someone on a couch and leafing through a wedding book. Or to receiving a letter (yes! an actual, on-paper, hand-written letter!) with a print enclosed. All are valid ways of sharing. I think sometimes we forget this.
All images Mamiya C330, Tri-X
And now, for the reason we are all here…ceremony and reception. Because it is, after all, a wedding! I loved this space for a ceremony at the Old Mill: outdoors, quiet, secluded, intimate, lush. The sound of a gentle stream gurgling just behind the couple. Every ceremony should be so serene.
As for crying brides, Kristy knocked it out of the park.
That about sums it up. Yeehaw!
See that glass of wine she’s holding? She made that wine. And it was good.
Another wonderful wedding in the books. Sadly, Kristy and Eric have moved from a couple miles from my house, up to Northern New Jersey, to pursue new and better job opportunities. No more meetings at the Ugly Moose, I guess. Really looking forward to designing this book and seeing the whole project come to a fantastic, hard-bound conclusion.
Thank you again to this especially wonderful couple for being awesome and putting on a classy, classic event. All the best!
And now for a bit from Eric, who, while Kristy was cavorting with an ice cream truck, was doing more serious wedding preparation things such as having a putting competition. Some shots herein, including the following three, were taken by the excellent Kate Efimova, whom you should know about. http://katefimphoto.com
And can we have an honest conversation about first looks? They’re great. That’s all. A great way to start heading the preparation toward the ceremony, a great way to loosen up a nervous couple, a great way to relax the whole flow of the day.
Tomorrow or so, ceremony and party.
Great people getting married deserve high-fives. I knew Kristy from a restaurant where we both used to work, and even though I hadn’t seen her in a bit, we reconnected, and I ended up having the chance to work with her and Eric on their wedding. Fantastic! I’ve gone on before a out how important rapport is in choosing a wedding photographer, so it is always calming knowing, going into things, that the couple is calm, cool, and collected, and that they day is going to be beautiful and compelling.
Brides: get yourself a demi-veil. Seriously. I will still like you even if you don’t have one, but really. Get yourself a demi-veil. Or a fascinator at the very least.
Demi-veil. Seriously, folks.
If you can’t get a demi-veil, maybe some custard will fill the void.
So that’s the Kristy side of pre-wedding things. Eric will get his turn next. He will not be wearing a demi-veil.
Here is from an engagement session yesterday with Emily and Vic. Guess when their wedding is!
Actually, this session was supposed to take place last weekend, but the weather was acting as if it were late March/early April, which is to say cold, windy, and rainy. We though about doing it next weekend, when the weather is supposed to be 90-something, meaning that I would need a Gatorade I.V. Instead, we settled on the best evening possible…perfect sunlight, wonderful temperature, an excellent spot in the Azalea Garden all to ourselves.
Emily and Vic are friends with Hannah and Mitch, whose wedding I shot (and whose new-born I also got to take portraits of) a couple New Yearses ago…thanks to them for the referral! I had to scour the wedding pictures to see if Emily and Vic were in any of the shots, but somehow they seem to have escaped my camera for the evening. They will not be so lucky come August next.
Emily and Vic both love reading, and they brought along some of their favorite books. I was happy to see The World of Pooh in there, as that is a book that I sometimes read to my older daughter. Emily and Vic did a bit of reading, and then it was off to the Philadelphia Museum of Art…from lush vegetation to wonderful stone architecture, with a spiffing door and a skyline thrown in for good measure.
Love it. Another successful example of a couple who said, “We are dang awkward with cameras,” and who then proceeded to rock it out like old pros.
Jeanette and Brian’s wonderfully beautiful wedding is solid proof that you should never think that Plan C would be any worse than Plans A and B. After all, this was not where the wedding was supposed to be. It was supposed to be outside in the Azalea Garden. But there was a change of officiants, and there was a change of weather, and since outdoor weddings aren’t so great when it is grey and drizzly and the ground is soaked, we ended up at Philadelphia Wedding Chapel, with With This Ring’s Stacey Thomas presiding.
I’m such a sucker for a beautiful room. Brides are always beautiful, and no doubt that Jeanette brung it in the best of fashion (I especially appreciated that her hair didn’t look as if it had been shellacked, and that her jewelry was simple and elegant); I think that wearing a gown just brings out the best in how a bride carries herself. But a brilliant room makes such a difference, so if you are reading this, and you are looking for a place to get married, please consider a place that has lots of brick and gigantic windows. Or some other amazing, visually interesting venue. Preferably with gigantic windows.
So there was a bit of planning drama during the week running up to the wedding, but always remember: at the end of the day, you are going to be married, and it is the little hiccups during the day, such as the flower girls fleeing the scene, or the weather driving you inside to a really wonderful ceremony space, that can often stand out as the highlights.
And Jeanette and Brian were yet another wonderful, laid-back, easy-going couple. Favorite moment of the day: Brian was getting a bit itchy with all the family group shots, so when it came time to photograph just him, Jeanette, and their two girls, he just laid down on the floor, assumed his parental duties as a portable jungle gym, and we had a few minutes of ridiculousness and ludicrosity rolling around on the floor. I ended up on my stomach, and we got a few really good shots. The quality of wedding photography can really come down to how expressive the couple is, and these two were great in that regard.
All the best to Jeanette and Brian!
On the subject of weddings am eagerly anticipating, I give you Jason and Meredith. As it turns out, they used to live just a few miles from where I grew up in Connecticut. Even better, though, is that they are a couple who are savvy about photography. By that, I mean that they can clearly articulate stylistic ideas that they are interested in, and that really helps me as a photographer meet, and hopefully exceed, their expectations. Case in point: Meredith mentioned that she has a thing for Instagrammy, crossed-processy-looking images, and requested that a few images be presented that way. Excellent! And since that look is essentially expired film, cross-processed, I was able to do just that. I’m looking forward to shooting some of their wedding on a Holga with expired slide film, just to delve even deeper into the style.
We traipsed around the Wissahickon and the near neighborhood, then ended up on Main Street for a beer. If engagement sessions are a good way for a couple and a photographer to get used to working together, then I think we are off to a solid start.
