I used to be able to do this; no joke. And my adductor is healing nicely, so I should be able to do it again soon.
Always stretch before you boogie.
Tag Archives: wedding photography
Sometimes you just can’t ask for the light to hit someone any better than it is.
The bride, groom, best man, and maid-of-honor walk away from the reception after a long, long day.
I’ll have a full write-up of my workshop later today, but here’s a teaser image from it. One of my mantras that I shared with the group is to keep pushing yourself until there is a decent possibility you might fail — if all of your shots are pretty good, you’re not expanding yourself. (Of course, this has to be at times where you are safe to fail on a few frames. The first kiss is probably not the best place for it).
So I let the group watch as I decided to give myself a challenge: I would find the most boring, ugly place around and take photos right there. So I found a featureless office hallway with the ugliest green fluorescent lighting you’ve ever seen. The only thing it had going for it was the natural perspective of a hallway. So I took my awesome couple and sat them down, so that we could see that perspective better, and I lit them with a very warm, tungsten video light. With white balance correction, that turned the ambient from a horrible puke-green to a kind of funky and cool deep turquoise, a nice contrast to her red shirt, and of course this is kind of a funky couple.
When life hands you sunsets like this, you use them.
The first full-day Ryan Brenizer photography workshop starts tomorrow! All full up, but dispatches and more dates to come!
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.
Ok, this one is just cute. Henry and Viviana told me that she used to wait for him at this restaurant every week before the dance class they took together, and he would come up and tap on the window. So we re-enacted it, with a twist.
If not for the calling of journalism and photography, I had a dream to attend the University of Chicago School of Social Thought, which basically locks you in academia forever. So I was especially excited to shoot Victoria and Alex’s wedding on the gorgeous U of Chicago campus. They were both graduates, as well as most of the non-family guests, which always makes for a fun social scene. As for the tone of the wedding? Gorgeous, fun, and … delightfuly geeky. The best man brought a giant printout of this xkcd comic to the rehearsal dinner, after all, and compared the bride (as a girl vying for his best friend’s affections) to the brain-eating zombies in Zombieland.
Of course, I’m an online columnist. These are my people. And as you can see from the photos and slideshow, it was a fantastic group of people to spend the weekend with.
The hardest thing about doing engagement shoots is to get a shot that the client will love but that I haven’t seen before. Luckily, there are few places for surprises like New York City.
View the slideshow!
(And try not to be drinking anything, lest you snort it out your nose.)
These two crazy kids broke my system! I had resolved to myself that, no matter how much I loved a couple and the photos, I would always edit a blog post down to 10 photos and put the rest in the slideshow, so I could show a little self-restraint. But I didn’t count on Kenny and Stephanie, or their willingness to act out a skit in a Berkeley college classroom that, as a sign of the gods, already had a chalkboard filled out with equations like “2Love+ 2Love = 4Love” when we came in! The skit would have taken up half my set, but the whole wedding was so fantastic I couldn’t let it stand. So let’s start with their act:
(That’s my messy handwriting)
Kenny and Stephanie, as you might have imagined, are absolutely hilarious. In fact, professionally so — they’re both writers, and Kenny in particular works for comedic television shows, and many of his friends were alumni of his college humor magazine (watch the slideshow to see them successfully pull off a human pyramid with the bride on top!)
It was a beautiful time of year to be in Berkeley and San Francisco, and a fantastic ceremony, including touching statements from bride and groom about why they’re marrying each other, and a lengthy, poignant reading of David Sedaris. The only sad part was I had to go back to freezing New York!
View this wedding’s full slideshow!
Here’s one from the Wayback Machine. Jen and Chris are friends of mine, and I was honored to shoot their wedding at a gorgeous French restaurant in Upstate New York. The springtime was in full bloom and the grounds of the venue were absolutely gorgeous … which, of course, meant torrential rain. They weren’t upset and, since they know where I live, just decided it would be better to do most of the formals at some other time. “Some other time” ended up being four months later. So here they are!
The wedding was an intimate affair with fewer than 30 guests, an elaborate dinner party with unbelievable food and a (I timed it) seven-minute wedding ceremony performed by another friend of mine. Jen and Chris had the first (and only) dance to the musical stylings of Jen’s friend, who decided to sing along with the string performers.
Who knew that a couple who works in international policy could be so darned hot? I knew this would be a great wedding after Eva, Cris and I had a fun, very New York engagement shoot, and the wedding day itself was also as Manhattan as it can be: the ceremony and reception were at the Terrace in the Sky, next to their (and my) old stomping grounds of Columbia University, where they met. It was a beautiful day — I think October had the best weather this year by a country mile — and it continued well into the night. I shudder to think of how many languages were spoken by the collective guests.
Mea culpa. I’ve been racing so fast to get photos and products to my wonderful clients that I haven’t had the time to properly tell their stories here. I have a lot to say, though, so I’m going to try an interesting challenge: I will post something to this blog here every day for the next 25 days (behavioral theorists will note that’s long enough for an action to become habit-forming). Some of it will be discussion of photography tech, some of it will be tips, and some of it will be write-ups of the fantastic weddings and events I’ve been lucky to shoot, such as the fantastic wedding of Shanté and Akili.
Talk about a power couple: BOTH Shanté and Akili are surgeons. It’s only fitting that a young couple who has worked so hard to get where they are got married at a castle — the gorgeous Lyndhurst Manor in Tarrytown, NY.
If you have the time, I strongly recommend viewing the full slideshow of the wedding. Both of them looked awesome, and the party was energetic, to say the least.