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)

Sometimes trying to zig where others zag isn’t enough, and I remind myself to zig where I would normally zag. It’s the best way to see things in new ways, or after taking hundreds of thousands of photos and looking at countless millions more, taking those that make me say the magic words: “Hey, I haven’t seen that before.”
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Lens: 35mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s
Light: Sb-700 on a mini-stand.

But it was the couple that made the day truly great. By the time I photographed the wedding, I’d already shot their engagement portraits, their engagement party, and Kruti’s pre-wedding ceremonies, so I felt I knew them and their families very well by the start of the wedding day, and it was an absolute pleasure throughout. It takes a solid group of friends and family to stage an entire, 20-minute-long parody of Family Feud during the reception. Not for one moment did a little April showers slow this wedding down, as you’ll see below:

Sheesh, 30,000+ hits yesterday. Now back to your regularly scheduled weddings (but some Very Awesome Things are happening this week, which I can share soon).
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Lens: 24-70mm f/2.8
Camera: Nikon D3

And their reception at the Merion was as wild, emotional, and intense a celebration as I’ve seen. And given that most of my weddings seem to be in a constant competition for craziest dancing, that says a lot.

Coming soon: Stephanie and Rob

Lens: 24mm f/1.4
Camera: Nikon D3s

It’s not an engagement shoot. It’s a new invention of mine I call a “Three-and-a-half-month-later shoot.”

Reema and Kartik’s wedding was so lively, so filled with fun and family and 600 guests, that the only time they could stop to have some photos taken on the wedding day was for 30 seconds as they lined up to enter the reception. So I posed to them a simple choice: We could either take five minutes away from the crazy, constant party to get some great shots, or we could have another more casual shoot later.

They chose the non-stop party, and I think it was the best choice, particularly when they started the night with a carefully rehearsed Bollywood dance.

When you talk about epic weddings, this is epic. Fantastic planning, as always, by Shaadi Chic. 600 guests. Multiple outfits, including Reema’s metal dress that was as heavy as it sounds — ladies, you constantly amaze me with your endurance — and Kartik’s late-night cow outfit. Yes, epic. I really can’t even show you the craziest stuff, so you’ll just have to imagine. Congratulations!

I could spot from the first few minutes of the reception that things were going to get wild on the dance floor, and boy did they — especially once they cannibalized most of the props from the photo booth we were running. A fantastic day within the gorgeous setting of The Venetian, filled with great people.

I work in so many wonderful venues all over the world that it’s hard to pick favorites. But when a couple tells me they’re having a wedding at Blue Hill Stone Barns, I get particularly excited. You see, I love food. Some people call this being a “foodie,” I call it being a functioning human being. But in any case, there is nowhere I’ve been so devoted to reverence for food — from a gorgeous, pastoral farm setting where the ingredients are grown and raised, to exquisite preparation, just writing about it makes me want to go back there. But I get even more excited when I get to photograph a wedding there with a couple as classy and as fun as Danielle and Andrew.

I could talk about how amazing and strong their family connections were, about how down-to-earth they were the whole day, about the gorgeous ceremony, the exquisite details of the reception, and the food … oh, the food … but mostly I’m excited about the photos, so I’m going to get out of the way and show them to you.

I have always been a chocoholic, so I was very excited to shoot Lindsay and George’s wedding at the Hershey Hotel. And it’s true that the streets in Hershey, PA are paved with chocolate. Or at least they’re colored brown.

Lindsay and George are new transplants to the area, and we’d already had a great time with them and their dog in a NYC engagement shoot, so I expected a low-key, fun, beautiful day — and that’s exactly what I got. The ceremony was in a gorgeous stone alcove, making for a long and dramatic processional. They’d selected the officiant in part for his lively personality, and he delivered in spades with a ceremony that was in turns touching and hilarious: You can see in the photos below Lindsay reacting to his emphasis on “until DEATH!” in the vows.

The ceremony and reception paid homage to Greek heritage, from dual crowns to a slow folk dance that builds to a huge crescendo.

And yeah, there was kind of a nice sunset. You’ll see.

Congratulations!

There were a thousand moments when I knew I was going to get along with Carol and Johann — this is a couple that spent their rehearsal dinner performing trapeze tricks, after all — but I will always remember when he looked over my shoulder at a nearby wedding photographer and said “Hey look! That guy’s using his flash wrong!” (Yes, yes he was. Sorry about your underexposed formals, Mystery Couple). I love that my Internet presence gives me so many couples with a strong passion for photography themselves, because we can work together on a number of levels, and because this might be their one chance to actually put down a camera and enjoy themselves.

Carol and Johann had a gorgeous day at the Hyatt Harborside in Boston, the sun blazing over the skyline. They also had a hilarious priest who, during the ceremony, told us fascinating bits of Boston history and started calling out to me to make sure everything looked OK. (I gave a thumbs up). The night was devoted to fun, dancing, two fabulous cakes, great family, and a finishing treat of Jones Soda.

Congratulations, Carol and Johann!

The wedding was at Fordham. The groom went to Fordham. I went to Fordham. My assistant went to Fordham. I shoot for Fordham.

(Sorry, Viv. Penn State is a good college, too.)

I knew Henry a bit when we were in school together, and I’d been looking forward to this one for a while. We’re talking about a couple who met in salsa dancing class — if that isn’t the recipe for an awesome reception, I don’t know what is.

And it didn’t disappoint. From a ceremony at the gorgeous Fordham chapel to a colorful and energetic reception, it was a blast the entire day. And that’s not to mention the groomsmen’s hilarious stop at White Castle on the way to the reception, or Henry bringing in a singer to re-enact a classic moment from one of Viv’s favorite movies: Coming to America.

Awesome.

Here is another case of “We just did the engagement shoot, and I’d better get the images out because the wedding is tomorrow!” It does have a certain efficiency to it.

Karen and Kamil have flown me out to California to document their Malibu wedding, and if I thought I was excited before, I’ve reached Ludicrous Excitement after how much fun our engagement shoot was at their alma mater, Harvey Mudd College.

Have you ever seen Real Genius? If not, go rent it. It’s one of the best movies of all time. If you have, though, you remember a scene with a dorm literally bursting with anarchic, geeky energy in every corner. A place like this could only exist in the movies, right?

Wrong. West Dorm, where both Karen and Kamil spent all four years, surpasses every stereotype of every college movie I’ve ever seen. There are pirate flags, and bonfires, and motorcycles, and shopping carts with Pabst Blue Ribbon cup holders. It is college at its most primal, both revelled in and enjoyed ironically.

For the first time, I actually can’t show some of my favorite images from the shoot, because so much of the West decor is Not Safe for Work.

So when I tell couples to find places that have meaning for them, and not just the prettiest possible place, I mean it.

With their engagement shoot still fresh, I was thrilled to start my 2010 wedding season with Emily and Myles. I knew from experience that not only were they passionate and fun, but boy do they know how to throw a party. I have never before seen a bride even consider doing The Worm at the reception (at the great Scarsdale Women’s Club). She thought better of it, though. Of course, the party was destined to be fun the moment the bridesmaids were given their garters, complete with flasks.

But the wedding was as elegant as it was fun, with a ceremony and mass at the intimate and gorgeous St. James the Less in Scarsdale. Among Emily’s accoutrements were a veil that had been in her family for generations and a ring from the 1800s!

Thanks guys and congratulations!

Big post to follow. Hey, it’s a new year and I’m excited.

Also, video lovers and camera geeks will want to see this capture of the Last Dance, filmed on the D3s at ISO 12,800.

I could have made an entire album just from this adorable fireball of a flower girl.

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!

You may recognize one of the guests there — she was the bride in my previous post, and sister to one of the grooms! As you’ve probably picked up from that and the title, this was my first gay wedding, and it was a beautiful experience. I know that this is a hugely contentious issue now with intractable beliefs on both sides, so I’d love it if someone’s wedding photos weren’t weighed down by a bunch of political comments on either side of the issue. That said, this was probably the most emotional wedding ceremony I’ve ever shot. It took me by surprise, actually — if stereotypes were true, a wedding without a bride should be relatively casual, right? But weddings are pretty important things to me, and it struck me that while many people grow up dreaming about their perfect wedding, Jon and Jerry had to grow up thinking “Well, that’s not for me.” They and their parents had spent years thinking that this would never come, and it came out with intensity and joy and relief.

It was a great Boston November day, and apparently the perfect day to get married, since the park was filled with roaming wedding parties, photographers in tow, like herds of migratory animals — Jerry even ran into a bride that he knew! The ceremony and reception hall were beautiful — refined, but still open enough to let people dance like mad.

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.