Three weeks ago, a friend asked if I could videotape his wedding, and get some photos. We had met a few months ago at the memorial for a mutual friend, the one in "One eyed Jack" in the annual. I said I would, warned him that I'd never photographed a wedding, apart from one when I was in high school, and refused offers of money.
Before the ceremony, I got some greycard shots, put the 16-50 on the K-5 and the 77 on the K-x. I set up my camcorder at what seemed like a reasonable location, and once things got started realized there wasn't much more I could do with the camcorder. In retrospect, I should have asked John's widow if I could borrow his 5DmkII, I also probably should have set the camcorder up in a back corner of the alter so it would have seen the faces of the couple rather than the face of Father Jeff. If I were to do weddings for a living, I'd invest in a few of those "go" video cameras, which are small enough that they could be strategically placed in bouquets to unobtrusively get much better angles of the ceremony. Other things that I learned: The K-x is not the camera for shooting weddings, there is no way of telling what it's focusing on. I lost several fairly important shots that way. The K-5 is close to good enough, but not quite there. The 16-50 is a bit too wide for shooting the ceremony. The wedding couple had even less experience getting married than I had photographing weddings. The ceremony started without my getting any warning. The long and the short of it, I got some decent photos, but weddings are not the sort of photography that I do my best at. I do much better at the method of successive approximations, trying things until I get them right, rather than fast paced, don't miss the moment, even without warning, photography. After the ceremony and reception, the groom asked the best man and I to kill some time with the bridesmaids, two from Colorado, one from St. Petersburg, so that the happy couple could "have a little bit of time alone". The initial thought was touristy stuff in Monterey, but we ended up heading down to Big Sur instead. I spent my afternoon in "Big Sur with three Russian bridesmaids" sounds a lot more interesting than "I spent the afternoon in the back seat of another guys Prius while we schlepped some tourists around". It's going to be a while until I get through all 1200 or so shots from yesterday. Apart from the obligatory ceremony, reception and posed photos, there are actually a few things in Big Sur worth taking pictures of. I did a quick pass through the pictures from the ceremony so that they won't have to wait two weeks until things settle down for me again. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157630360497840/ -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
