"Work is Love Made Visible." --Kahlil Gibran
This will hopefully be the coldest engagement shoot I ever do. Not Nick and Rebecca, who are warm and fun and awesome, but the unbelievably freezing weather. Since Nick and Rebecca are long-time friends of mine, I felt free to poke at them a bit about the weather in this Nikon D3s video.
I did an engagement shoot on Saturday with Adam and Chastity, and had a great time despite the FREEZING cold. We decided to pause whenever my fingers couldn’t feel the shutter button anymore.
Kindiya and Thomas later told me that they had no idea why I was standing 10 feet away and shooting at a moped while they kissed. Surprise!
Note to DJs: Please stop using red and geen laser dots. Chicken pox are generally not a good look. In this case, though, I just went with it, shot at f/1.4 with the ambient light, and let the laser lights fill in the scene … including the groom’s mouth.
I said you’d see more of these guys. The first couple who actually walked the length of the Brooklyn Bridge with me for a shoot, they deserved a bit of rest at the end.
Remember Timoria and Bob? What a great couple, and a fantastic wedding.
I hate back-tracking. If I miss an exit, I’ll probably look for the best route forward, 10 miles out of the way, instead of just turning back. And so it is with equipment. I just don’t like the idea of replacing a broken lens with the same darned lens. Lenses are tools, and they all give us their own unique way to see, so why not try new things? The 24-70 broke again? Fine. Sure, it’s maybe the best, most useful lenses ever made, but that can also make it boring if you’re not careful. Let’s try some new ways of seeing. Wider, longer, faster. The Sigma 50mm f/1.4 broke? Ouch, that one hurt. Not only did I love the thing, but I got one of the very first copies ever on American soil. I literally picked it up at the warehouse for the first shipment (a post-apocalyptic place in East Williamsburg).
So instead of new, let’s go old. My new, old way of seeing is the Nikon 50mm f/1.2. It’s a manual focus lens, but I’ve always liked working with it (the photo above was taken with my assistant’s 50mm f/1.2). I’m always either shooting or looking for the next shot at a wedding, and putting that tricky beast means a little more looking, a little more breathing, with rewarding results.
Plus, as a quick tip, you can always buy great lenses used and not feel bad about the price, since you can sell them to someone else for the same cost. Unless, of course, I break it. There’s about even odds for that.
At least they did in this case. Such an amazingly fun engagement shoot, more to come!
I freely admit that I am not, generally speaking, a subtle photographer. You don’t really have to spend much time looking at most of my photos and pondering “But is it … art?” I like big and brash and fun and crazy and romantic and daring and colorful and … you get the picture.
So I guess you’d think that the first shot I’d post with my new toy, the three-flash set-up I call The Sledgehammer of Light, that I really would have gone nuclear, right?
OK, if it had been a sunny day, I probably would have. But it wasn’t, and so I went with the murkiness to create an image with a feel of mystery. One of the other great things about the Sledgehammer of Light is that you can trigger it in full CLS mode, which means syncing to 1/8000th of a second … which means the shallow depth-of-field of shooting at f/1.4 with flash outdoors. Usually when you try that trick, the flash power gets *really* weak by 1/8000th. But, of course, we have three of them, enough for a subtle kiss of light from a distance.
Kat and Zak’s wedding was the first time I got to break out my Sigma 24mm f/1.8. It’s never been a traditionally well-regarded lens, perhaps because of quality control, and indeed my copy was WAY off out of the box. But some new cameras can calibrate focus per-lens manually, and that turned this into a sharp, fast, wide lens with near-macro abilities. The wide-angle nature forces me to be more creative with my macro shots. Since Kat and Zak had a corner of their house entirely devoted to video game consoles, this was a natural choice.
I’ll try and get up as much new content this week as I can. Here was a photo I took in my recent foray to Nashville, with fellow photographer Lynn Michelle as the model. I bought a Lastolite Triflash to hold three SB-900 flashes at once. Usually people just use this to pur a giant amount of light on in one direction, but here I used it from behind her to send two beams of light out to the sides and one back toward me, making the light fill and shape the area.
I love this photo but never really featured it. Emilie was just an awesome bride as you can plainly see. We took this at the end of the night, and Noel said “all I can do at this point is sit.”
“Good,” I said, “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”
Noel is lit by a simple speedlight, but Emilie got the big light treatment, a White Lightning 1600 blasting through a big octobox.
Stephanie finally gave in: "OK, you can do any weird lighting you want on me!" So we had some fun with light-painting. One exposure, painted with the Lowel ID video light.
Believe it or not, this was not the weirdest one we got. More to come.
