Dan & Emma
Dan & Emma Thurrock hotel 22nd Feb
Wedding day at the Thurrock hotel Aveley, the day started freezing cold again well there’s a surprise, and snowing as well.
Dan & Emma were getting married at 2.30. The day started out well all equipment was checked, all batteries were charged and all memory cards were formatted and I was off.
The first stop was Emma’s house for the bride getting ready who was already ready by the time I arrived by a couple of hours ahh well a handful of posed mirror headshots and some portrait shots with Emma and her two daughters and mum and dad, simple set up Nikon D300s 17-55 2.8, sb910 with a rogue flash bender to bounce vertical flash, quite a bright room but the flash was there to just take the shadows off under the eyes, nose, and chin, quick manual meter read 1/125 f9 and all done and off to the hotel for the rest of the day.
Dan and his best man were first and both looked very nervous but a good chat of jovial banter helped relax them as I had help from a fellow photographer Mr. Savash djemal we could get multiple angle shots, the light was ok, no sunlight and very overcast so I decided to use “p” with ttl-bl fill flash minus 0.3 0.7 EV for fill and then tried the same on full manual and used a mixture of the two right up to the service always checking flash exposure compensation to get the best results, and as the day went on everything went smoothly until the service had finished. As it was really really cold outside and snowing neither the bride and groom nor guests wanted to go into the garden for photos so we set up shots in the service room so I was unable to get the planned group and posed shots done, but hey that the life of a wedding photographer always having to adapt to ever-changing situations, but easy to fix, set up was a d700, Tokina 12-24 f4 on-camera flash sb910 bounced off the ceiling, I would have preferred to set up two cls 910’s on stands with shoot-through umbrellas for a softer light but time was now against us before the wedding breakfast. We got lots of excellent shots and some really good ad hoc improvised posed shots as we went on and the only part of the shoot I didn’t like was not getting outside.
After the wedding breakfast which I don’t film as guests get put off by someone sticking a great big 70-200 in their face, we moved on to casual ” natural life ” shots of everyone letting their hair down and generally having a good time, savash got some really good images of all the kids and then we moved onto the first dance, which was a D700 for the high iso ability, no flash with a 24-70 2.8 iso 1200 1/8 second at f8 tripod-mounted for the dance which again went really well getting nice blurred romantic movements of the couple.
After the dance the booze was flowing quite freely by now so a good time for candids and as the evening went by lots of really good shots for the couple to enjoy later on.
Back home cards dumped onto pc then backed up onto hard drives and so the process begins….. till next time.
