Ryan Brenizer — NYC Wedding Photographer. Problem solver, storyteller.

Every time I do a wedding for Fordham alumni I’m reminded of why I’m proud to be one — sure, there’s a beautiful campus in the middle of NYC, including a gorgeous chapel Anne and Griffin were married in, but what I continue to love most are the people. Fun, driven, open, gregarious — the sort of people who know that guests in the middle of heavy revelry, even guests who have been enjoying Abagail Kirsch’s fantastic catering at the Lillian and Amy Goldman Stone Mill, need a little White Castle to keep them going.

Fordham and the Botanic Gardens, right across the street from each other, was a great combination to take advantage of the fall day. The foliage was peaking out, they looked fantastic … and they got to visit her old dorm room, where a gracious but confused girl let the wedding party in for a few photos and then a foosball match.

And the definition of a great reception is when there are so many photos that I desperately want to share with the world, but know I probably shouldn’t.

View full post »

You may remember Maly and Craig from their fantastic wedding at the Metopolitain Building. They are still as great as ever, the sort of couple that act like they’re in the middle of an engagement shoot even when the cameras aren’t on them.

We started the shooting section with a workshop with a thorough demonstration of the Brenizer Method because, to paraphrase David Spade, I figured not doing that would be like going to a Big Country concert and they don’t play “Big Country.” One of the things that has surprised me as this has become more and more popular is that even though lots of people are trying it and quite a few are getting the basic technique down, there are relatively few people out there using it to make good photos. All the method does is give you a way to take photos with impossibly shallow depth-of-field; the depth of feeling in the photo is up to you.

So we spent time talking about when to apply it, and some tips on making them good. I’d deliberately placed Craig and Maly here so that the tree wouldn’t just be blurry in the background, but would poke into and play with the focal plane, given a sense of 3D.

I think the problem I spent most of my time trying to overcome in photography is that photos are two-dimensional, and the world isn’t. If I can bring some of that depth back through focus or lighting or composition and expression, I’m on it.

(Except when flat is cool.)
—
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 24-image “Brenizer method” panorama with the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 (equivalent of 28mm f/0.45 according to Brett’s calculator)

I may have broken RSS syndication and many other things on a mad whim. My old portfolio site has gotten me in contact with so many amazing clients, and the work that Koesmanto Bong put into it made it stand out from the crowd in the far-off days of 2007, when people would ask “No auto-loading music? NO FLASH? My God man, are you sure that’s a wedding photography Web site?”

But time has passed, and I would be too busy to update it for entire seasons at a time, all the while obsessing over getting new and better content to the blog as often as possible. I am not who I was in high school, in college, as a newspaper man, as a photographer for Columbia University, and I am not who I was in 2007. My hair has more grey but I have better clothes (even if I don’t always wear the nice stuff.) And along the way the standards of how wedding photography interacts with the Web has changed. Big photos good. Obtrusive watermarks bad. It’s freer and looser and better-looking, and I like it. If some student in Estonia steals your photo for their web site desktop … oh well. There are 3.5 trillion photos out there, it’ll happen. If some big corporation does it, that’s what copyrights and lawyers are for.

Of course, the downside of having a blog as your home base is it’s a bit terrifying having the front-and-center of my commercial existence be whatever I got up to most recently, even if that is a picture of a really good hamburger I ate. But my philosophy has always been to do everything that I can to make each new wedding the best I’ve ever done, whatever the weather, the timing, or the situation. Each client who books with me gets to see slideshows from every wedding I’ve photographed in the previous year, because wedding photography isn’t the sort of job where you can be brilliant sometimes and then phone it in other days. That’s what office jobs are for. (I’ve worked in an office; you can admit it.)

And there’s something more honest about it. I admit; whenever I look at another photographer’s site I usually skip the portfolio and go straight for the blog. Yes, even a monkey can take a great photo occasionally, but what have you done lately? So perhaps ironically, this is also a move to get me back to thinking about portfolios more than ever, about the sort of work I want to leave behind, about doing what I can to raise the bar. Big photos, no watermarks, and a content-management system that will keep me updating it in my spare scraps of free time. We’ll work on something new and personal and innovative later — perhaps the dead of winter when people are too worried about blizzards to get married — but for now I have a surprisingly handy stop-gap.

So, the new layout is ryanbrenizer.com for my recent work and updates about workshops and my life in general, and ryanbrenizer.com/portfolio for what will eventually be a finely carved display of personal vision … or at least some pretty photos.

Along the way I’ve probably broken all of my sydicated feeds. Sorry.

I have today’s Photo of the Day over on Moment Junkie.com, just to make sure that you all are reading Moment Junkie. Right?

Here’s a little side-project I’ve been working on with photographer Kyle Hepp and the input of lots of other photographers: MomentJunkie.com, a new blog featuring the most tender, most quirky, most hilarious, most joyful, most heartbreaking images we can find from photographers all over the globe!

“Now Ryan,” you say, “You’re extremely busy, is it wise to spend time on a site mostly promoting the work of other photographers?”

I don’t know, from a business sense. But this is important to me. Beyond all the cool portraits and fun techniques and quirky compositional trends, weddings are about people, and the way they relate to each other. They are key points in the histories not just of brides and grooms, but of friends and families. I remember my aunt’s wedding where I first learned my love for the dance floor, where my mother broke my cousin’s foot on said dance foor, where we dinged the glasses so hard we shattered three of them. I remember my mother marrying my step-father where my family did The Wave during the ceremony. And yes, I still remember my own wedding, and I treasure so many of the photos of it even if the relationship was not meant to be, because they showed joyful, tearful, and crazy sides of so many people I hold dear.

Despite what a hundred reality shows will tell you, weddings are about people. The rest is just window dressing. Viva la revolución.

I have been a russophile ever since the days I stayed up late in my dorm room, listening to tapes and poring over books on my own to read Dostoevsky and Pushkin in their native tongue. It didn’t get quite that far, and sadly lack of use has left me able to say only “My name is Ryan. This is a beautiful post office,” but it still added to my enjoyment of Svetlana and Dmitry’s wedding, filled with Eastern European touches throughout the day, including most of the reception toasts given in Russian.

They did a fantastic job working with the Westbury Manor to bring their wedding vision to life, with details right down to a cocktail Svetlana designed herself. Along the way, while we were having a great time at the waterfront shooting portraits, we ran into the cast and crew of Running Wilde. The ladies jumped at the chance to see Keri Russell while I, a consummate Arrested Development fan, waved to Will Arnett and David Cross, clad in jester costume.

Any day spent with a heartfelt, family-oriented wedding, a couple so obviously in love, and the guy in the $6,300 suit, is a day well-spent. Congratulations!

It was a Jersey Shore wedding with 100 percent less Snooki and a billion times more awesome. A sunny, blessedly cool day allowed Charity and Adam to get married right on the beach with a low-key, heartfelt ceremony. This was one of the few weddings where the clear photographic hams of the bunch were the groomsmen. I’ve finished photographing the bridesmaids and I turn around, and all of the groomsmen have themselves laid out around the area in various GQ poses, turned to the light just so. There was no question that we’d have a good time.

It was a gorgeous day, all the more welcome since we braved frostbite for the engagement shoot. Raucous, fun, loving, perfect. Congratulations!

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)