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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
Category Archives: wedding
Rocking it Hong Kong style.
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
Just a reminder that, with all this talk of authenticity on the blog this week, I do still like a nice trick or two. And when you arrive in the chosen spot for wedding portraits and it’s pitch black, it’s nice to have a big back of tricks, literally and metaphorically. It took a flash composite AND a panorama to pull this one off.
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Lowel id-light
This wedding knocked my socks off … literally. I shot most of it barefoot.
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
It’s not often that I can pull off a candid “Brenizer method” panorama, but here’s a 10-photo image from when the couple took a break at their Stage 6 at Steiner Studios wedding reception to spend a minute alone with the skyline. Like any extreme panorama, it reads best in very large sizes, so here it is in exactly one percent of the original area. One adage of panoramas is that at any given print size you’re compressing out the noise, handy at ISO 10,000.
10 photos with the Sigma 85mm f/1.4.
I knew that Lisa Marie and I would be fast friends from the start. She has a vivacious energy that absolutely never stops, even on a normal day — so I knew she’d be bubbling over at her wedding.
There’s something about weddings at remote lodging like the Wintrop Estate in Lenox Massachusetts that makes it feel like a wonderful family getaway where they just happened to throw a gorgeous wedding. Family and guests were already milling around the area when I got there, having slept there the night before, so it was a communal celebration right from the start.
It was a long and not always easy road for Lisa Marie and Rudy to bring this wedding about, and so it ran the gamut of emotions, with tears flowing into laughter and back again in the space of seconds. The sort of people I’m happy to just be around for a day, taking their energy in, let alone photograph.
I love shooting in November, at least when it’s unseasonably warm as it has been. It could be noon and the sun still comes as a flattering oblique angle. But it also means that it gets dark early. Really early. So if your ceremony runs a little long, you might show up at the gorgeous pier you selected for your wedding photos and find that it’s pitch black, so dark you need a flashlight just to see where you can walk.
No problem.
This was much darker in real life than in the photo. A quick tip: Live View is awesome for nailing manual focus in conditions too dark for your eye to see. It’s a good time to be a photographer when our mechanical eyes can give us a hand from time to time.
Of course, being paranoid is a big part of this game. I knew darkness was a strong possibility, so I brought every continuous light source I own. If nothing else, they made great flashlights.
(The reflection is off a particularly nasty puddle in a pile of gravel.)
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Backlit with Lowel id-light
Driving rain and zero visibility the night before couldn’t keep me from making it down to Baltimore for Amanda and Bennet’s wedding at Tabrizi’s. Luckily the rain broke overnight, and the day was absolutely perfect.
Amanda and Bennett are great guinea pigs for me. I shot part of their engagement as my first shoot with the Fuji X100, and I shot part of their wedding on film with the Hasselblad H2F. It’s hard to go wrong with the beauty and sense of form and style of ex-dancer Amanda.
Valerie, my summer 2012 intern, rocked it on this shoot, and a couple of the photos are hers from when she could get in places I couldn’t, either different angles on the ceremony or one memorable point where she scrambled up on the roof of their house. Pure gumption.
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Elizabeth had long dreamed of a November wedding in Central Park. This is why.
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Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 29-image “Brenizer method” panorama with the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 (equivalent of 38mm f/0.6 according to Brett’s calculator)
This is one of those pictures that even my large-size blog format doesn’t really do justice — the original is about 150 megapixels.
I can’t post the full set without permission due to extreme fabulousness, but I will ask nicely, because this was a fantastic wedding day.
Brenizer method and flash composite. Because why not.
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Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 36-image “Brenizer method” panorama with the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 (equivalent of 23mm f/0.38 according to Brett’s calculator)
I’m on my way back from the Foundation conference in New Orleans, which is a fantastic gathering of wedding photojournalists devoted to storytelling, focusing on the moment and the really important things that got me excited about wedding photography in the first place. I am so motivated and buzzing to go out and tell my clients’ stories, so then I went back in time to September and photographed Jessica and Brian’s fantastic wedding at Stonehouse at Stirling Ridge, making sure to focus on the quirky, fun, and deeply emotional moments.
Or maybe it was just that the day was already so emotional and fun that I had all the energy I could use anyway. This is a family that really knows how to hug. They go in for it, they get squishy-faced and emotional and just let you know that “Yes. Now. This. I love you. I love this moment.”
I’m a non-stop mover on the wedding day — if I’m not shooting, I’m looking for a better photo, and often my assistants have to literally chase me down if they want to talk to me. But every once and a while I’ll get a few seconds of break and get so excited about something that I have to share it with Wendy. And so, halfway through the wedding, she got a message that read “Dude! S’Mores!”
S’Mores over a fire pit? That’s the perfect way to end any day, let alone a gorgeous wedding. Good job.
This is much, much closer to out-of-camera than you might think. So much more to come.
But first, a stop by New Orleans to see my buddies at the Foundation Conference!
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Trees lit by Sb-900s triggered by PocketWizard FlexTT5
Yelena and Ben really picked the right day of this weekend to get married. After the record-breaking snow on Saturday, this is what we had yesterday — a gorgeous wedding at Guastivino’s in Manhattan.
I had to fight every urge to not just stay up all night and post this whole wedding today. Finally I remembered that I felt the same way about all the other weddings I’ve photographed recently. It’s telling in a lot of ways that I’m headed to Aruba on Wednesday and I’m excited to look through and edit the great weddings that I’ve had happen in front of my lens in recent weeks.
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Lens: Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6
Camera: Nikon D3s
I was boarding a plane to Munich this past December when I saw a couple out of the corner of my eye. The first thing that registered was “Man, that’s a good-looking couple.” It took about three more seconds before I actually fully saw them and realized — wait a second — I’m shooting their wedding! Only I would bump into one of my couples in Munich.
But it’s not as unlikely as it seems. Kim is American by birth and Korbinian is German, and they both live in Munich. With so many of Kim’s friends and family here, I can only imagine the frequent flier miles they rack up. Due to their schedule, we’d done their engagement shoot the year before at mid-day on one of the hottest Manhattan days in years, and perhaps to make up for it the weather for their wedding was nice and cool, threatening rain at first but opening up into a partly cloudy day that made for another spectacular Battery Gardens sunset.
I know a lot of photographers think that the reception isn’t as integral a part of the day as the ceremony and portraits, but it’s weddings like this that remind me that the party is every bit as important. Before the ceremony, there’s still so much to worry about, from eyeing the weather to making sure about the timing and a thousand other things, and the ceremony at the gorgeous Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Steon is so personal and intimate, but to then see a couple get to unwind, laugh, cry, and dance, dance, dance with people they love and haven’t seen together in so long is a beautiful process. And boy, could they dance.
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