I took this with a point-and-shoot camera while on an 18-hour vacation in Cold Spring, NY. If your point-and-shoot has manual control, you can get a lot out of it by forcing it to do what what you want, including using extreme underexposure to change the nature of a scene.

(EXIF and GPS)

I am extremely excited to a) have my workshop coming up this weekend and b) have Sameepa and Beeren’s wedding in the pipeline. This is going to be fun.

I am clearly on an Ilana and Paul kick this week. I started thinking of them again when a new client discussed Russian Jewish weddings, and can’t believe I haven’t posted this. What an elegant, wild night it was!

(The lamp here is mostly for ambiance, video light did the heavy lifting).

I spent last week in the Los Angeles area for a Malibu wedding, which gave me opportunity to spend time with my brother and his awesome family. Here my nephew Dougie (voluntarily!) chomps into a lemon.

Photos like these are why I am a “moment junkie.” This is a cheerful hug between the bride, her father, and her grandfather, right after Viviana and her grandfather had a featured dance. Is it envelope-pushing art? No. Is it a picture that will have meaning for Viviana for the rest of her life? I’d imagine so. Let’s not forget that weddings are about moments like these more than centerpieces.

But here’s a bone for the photo-geeks as well: This photo was taken on the D3s at ISO 10,000, with no noise reduction. The mixture of such a high ISO with flash is why the picture is sharp but still lets in all that colorful background ambient light. What a crazy camera.

I shoot detail. I don’t really show a lot of it, especially on the blog, because … I don’t know, it just seems so easy, at least the way wedding photographers do it. Awesome things are presented before us, and we make them look the way they are. Not the hardest part of the job, but wedding publications eat it up. Too much of this seems unbalanced to me, like centerpieces are more important than love and friends and family.

Still, details are important, and shooting them is fun when you can be creative. And it was rarely more fun than with the geeky and stylish do-it-yourself details of Karen and Kamil’s wedding in Malibu yesterday. More to come.

PS: Since my hobby is making life difficult for myself, I made this not-easy by using an extremely touchy manual-focus lens and having to hold the camera upside down to get the flash where I wanted it.

Given that Viviana and Henry met in dance class, I knew they could be up to making their presence felt in a big scene. Adding to the drama is a backlight from the Sledgehammer of Light, each strobe at half power.

As I teach in my classes, there is nothing new about the idea of compositing images so multiple subjects can be perfectly lit — it’s pretty much the standard in big ad campaigns, editorial shoots, you name it. But the important thing for a wedding day that will let you do it FAST. And that premium increases when you have a bridal party standing in a New York February. This took less than three minutes to shoot.

God I love the Horah. But they should probably develop some specific chairs for it. Lightweight with a good base that you won’t feel like you’re falling out of. Maybe velcro. Or a seat-belt.

Clearly I’ve found my first wedding product to sell. Who needs actions when you can sell chairs?

A nice moment of a wonderful Australian couple who came to New York to elope. Hey — the Australian flag is Red, White, and Blue, too!

The fill light is from a Lowel ID video light.

Sometimes expressions tell the whole story.

I know the veil-over-the-head-thing is a bit old hat at this point — I generally do it only if the wind actually does blow it over both their heads — but I tried to give it some new life here with the “Brenizer method” bokeh panorama. This is a panorama of 22 shots with the 85mm f/1.4.

Someone asked me recently, “Why are some people focused on creating ‘timeless images?’ Everything has a time and place. Weddings dresses get dated, hairstyles place you, so what is timelessness?”

It’s a fair question. Why avoid the major fads in wedding photography just because someone could look back at it and say “Oh, that was taken in 2009?” After all, you already know when the couple got married.

I guess the real question is: Will your images age well? Wedding photography is one of the few forms where it really, really matters what you’ll think of the photos in 30 years. No matter what changes technology makes, no matter what is hard now that will be easy then, people should feel good about their photos. And there are plenty of fads that make perfectly great photos — tilt-shift lenses come to mind.

But who can know the future? Why do we still love the classic tux after so many years but cringe when we see bell-bottoms? What the heck were wedding photographers thinking in the 80′s when they put couples heads in brandy glasses and floated parents’ heads over the ceremony? Well, it was hard to do then, so it was cool, and Uncle Bob couldn’t do it. But that, suffice to say, has aged poorly, while much older photography is still admired today. Try not to admire the work W. Eugene Smith did more than 60 years ago, among thousands of others of old masters.

We know exactly when the V-J Day kiss took place, but it still resonates strongly. So what’s the difference? I came up with an answer that seems as good to me as any:

“Moments are timeless; tricks may not be. And this comes from someone who knows a lot of tricks.”

Technology changes, cultural norms change, but emotions are emotions and images that convey real feeling may not be truly timeless, but they’ll age well.

(Photo at top: Remember Dana and Wes? That was an unposed moment. I was thinking about them today when I was listing clients who now have beautiful children).

Of course, as the sun went down and we kept shooting away, it got a bit more creative so we could show the kinds of things you can do with a camera that can see in the dark as well as the D3s can. And I took the opportunity to do some “Brenizer Method” photos, which will be clearly marked. Also, the post “Feeling Festive” was from this shoot.

ISO 200, 85mm, f/3.2, 1/125th

ISO 200, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/500th

ISO 1600, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/250th

“Brenizer method” (17 shots) ISO 1600, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/160th

“Brenizer method” (8 shots) ISO 1600, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/160th

ISO 12800, 52mm, f/3.2, 1/50th

ISO 4000, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/160th

ISO 3200, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/125th

“Brenizer method” (18 shots) ISO 4000, 85mm, f/1.4, 1/100th

And of course, since we’re interested in the video capabilities as well, here is a short clip of Stephanie taken at 85mm f/1.4, ISO 3200:

I am a product of two worlds. On the surface is someone who has been thoroughly Manhattanized. I get nervous when I am not within walking distance of a coffeeshop, and sometimes will wander around other towns at 1 a.m. wondering why everything is closed. But I am just as much a product of small upstate New York towns, the kind of place where you leave your doors unlocked and say hi to people on the street without them wondering what your angle is.

Sometimes, even knowing which town is your hometown can be complicated — look at how many towns in the Northeast try to lay claim to Walt Whitman or Edgar Allen Poe? Is it the mid-sized city Plattsburgh, where I was born, where I attended elementary school? Is it Lake Placid, which is usually where you have to tell native New Yorkers you’re from so they have a frame of reference? Or is it where I actually grew up as a child, in the woods, far from any neighbors, leaping over springs and running around wooded trails like a mid-80s Huck Finn?

I’ll pick Saranac Lake, where I went to high school and where I now return when I want to get away from the city’s chaos for the holiday. It’s a town so pastoral and pure that it became a tuberculosis sanitarium because city-dwellers would come here seeking a pleasant place to die … and then find that the clean air put the disease in total remission. It was actually named one of the best 11 small towns in America, by some sort of commission that can’t think in terms of Top 10 lists. Ok, here’s a photo not from an iPhone:

I wandered around Saranac Lake today, seeing ghosts of my memories on every street, feeling more peaceful and contemplative with every step. After just one weekend off from doing photography (my first since April), I already find myself thinking deeply about photography, what it means to me and to my clients, where I can go from here. What they don’t often tell you is that one of the best things about years of photography training is that simply looking at things is a richer experience. Many of my favorite photographs are taken only by my eyes, and the intended audience is only me. Today I saw things — entire fascinating buildings in a small town — that I never noticed in all my years growing up here. And little things as well.

There’s something deeply comforting about coming from a place that barely changes over the years, and thanks to the Adirondack Park Authority and their strict building rules, Saranac Lake will never become a strip-mall megalopolis. But I don’t know if I’ll ever return here. People talk about the pulse of Manhattan, how it breathes. A big part of that is that there are a heck of a lot of people, but more than that is that the air is thick with ambition. People there walk quickly and purposefully, because they know exactly what they’re going to do. It’s a theme park for workaholics, a place that you need to get away from to clear your head, but when you’re there it charges you as it challenges you. I always figured there would be a day I would want to slow down and look for space and comfort, but I don’t see that day on the horizon. The work I do is more than work. It invigorates me, pushes me forward, and when I do it right, I’m making people’s lives better. With all of that, how could I not be a workaholic? And we workaholics deserve a theme park.

But it’s nice to rest every once in a while.

You can see my post on the wedding with photos and slideshow here.

…and not just because they’re not wearing facepaint. The bride is wearing an unaltered 109-year-old dress!

Over at End User, I have done a review of Nikon’s new 35mm f/1.8, which I took this photo with. No vignetting was removed from this photo in post. Find out what I think!

So here are the latest results! You have to search for your wins and I’ve been known to have trophies arrive on my doorstep for images I didn’t know had placed, so tell me if I missed any:

3rd Place, Cake Cutting (From Eva and Lane’s wonderful New Orleans wedding)

4th place, Creative Portrait (From Jen and John’s great wedding in Chappaqua, NY)

and 5th place, Emotion, showing Kayla dancing during a wonderful little two-hour wedding at Lyndhurst Manor in Tarrytown, NY

We’ve had Rules for Shooting Groomsmen and Rules for Shooting Group Photos, so now it’s time for the big one: Rules for shooting couples.

1. This is the most romantic day of their lives. Play on that energy and capture it.

2. These photos aren’t just for them. They’re for the parents, they’re for the children they might have down the line. Bring class to the image, and it will be a lasting work.

3. Watch your backgrounds. Nothing ruins a romantic photo faster than unwanted clutter.

4. Weddings are, by their very nature, ritualistic. Sometimes even tried and true poses can be classic and fresh just because it’s them.

5. All of these are good rules, but not all clients are the same. Elegance and beauty are important, but so are individual personalities. If they’re a bit nuts in the best possible way like Dara and Chris, don’t be afraid to show that off. (Of course, there are a lot of couples — one would say the vast majority — for whom this shot wouldn’t work. And that’s cool, too.)

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/3511393 w=640&h=360]

Shot with “The Brenizer Method.” 30ish shots with the 85mm f/1.4 wide-open.