ASHLEY & TAVIS - Beach Wedding
I don’t know what it is about weddings but they keep calling me back. Today I found another reason why I love doing them. Everyone is dead tired, stressed, and running in "perfect mode." Everything has been mapped out to a spreadsheet with a perfect chronological order. The plan is perfect...on paper. For weddings in the real world, they never seem to happen as planed.
You can approach this dilemma with two attitudes. “Crap now what?” or “We can still make this work.” As a photographer I strongly believe that our job is to be an observer of the day, a helper, stress reliever, and make “you” look hot! So it is critical that we don’t do anything to make your life more stressful. Instead, do your job well, throw in a few jokes here and there, ask to help, and offer a friendly complement.
Well today was an exciting day to say the least. I was to arrive at the hotel to get the “ready shots” at 7:00am, leave the hotel for the beach at 8:15, start pictures at 8:30 and be done by 9:30-10.
Long story short my 1.5hr shoot turned into a fast 30min shoot with a rehearsal in the middle…But that’s what makes wedding photography so fun and challenging, you have little time and resources to get great shots of everyone. We don’t get time to set up extravagant lighting sets, do lighting tests, and have a art director to tell us what they want. No we get five min here and there. However, I would have it no other way.
The wedding party was beautiful and fun. My kinda fun too. Which is relaxed and willing to do crazy things for the sake of “the shot”.
For the Photographer:
This was my second attempt at shooting with RAW for a wedding. My first wedding I spent the next week and a half editing each individual photo in Photoshop and about cried, not to mention detested weddings. It took awhile to get over that for sure.
However I have been experimenting more with RAW images and saw a video where they edit the RAW files in bridge. So I tried it out and fell in love. Today I am very proud to announce that I finished editing all the photos in less than 6 hours, and I got a nap in!
One conflicts with lighting on the beach was the harsh lighting. Very difficult to get ride of squinting eyes and blown out images, however having the wedding party face you with their backs to the sun, somewhat creates shade on their face.
Cheers,
Peter M.
The beautiful bride finishing up getting ready and then heading out to the "first look."
I found a loose piece of grass and asked Tavis to "hide behind it". I wanted them to do some silly stuff so they would relax, it worked! He decided to tickle his new bride with it and they both shined in the moment.
