Thank you both so much for flying me halfway across the world to document your love, your fun, your insane door games (the smell of durian sandwiches is still with me), and so much more.

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.

I like the picture too much to ruin it with some sort of eye pun, but I’m tempted. Quis custodiet ipsos sponsam?
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s

But what you really didn’t hear is how none of that mattered. How much fun they had anyway at every part of the day. How close their family was, how great it was to see her brother Jeff and his wife Emily, whose wedding I photographed in 2008. How rain and electronic problems and all the challenges of a wedding day just become great stories to talk about later when a couple knows how to have fun together, which Cathy and Glen are great at. And, you know, the whole “looking fabulous” thing.

Yelena and Ben’s first dance in the dramatic architecture of Guastivino’s
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Sb-900 triggered by PocketWizard FlexTT5

You could consider this a *really* minimalist portrait of the Statue of Liberty.

No high-pass sharpening or crazy contrast adjustments. In the age of Photoshop, it’s good to remember that sometimes the sky just looks like that.
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s

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.)
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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)

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 an article up about my 9/11 experience and some related work at Adorama.com.

This was my view of the Tribute in Light from yesterday’s wedding at Battery Gardens.

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.

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)

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.