PBPhoto

We went to my family reunion this weekend in Kentucky.  Can't even describe how great the trip was on so many levels.  Had some revelations about my Dad's history.  Grew closer to my sister and her family (I love you guys).  Here they are!



Anyway, before I get too mushy, there was some photography going on as well.  The leaves thankfully changed while we were there.  So in my sister and brother-in-law's back yard me and the boys had some adventures.  They quickly got tired of Daddy stopping every 100 feet and setting up a strobe and umbrella.  But I was undeterred. 



OK I was a little deterred by this guy.  If you have a genus and species on this, please let me know.



The colors were amazing.








The shots above are using a strobe in a shoot-thru umbrella.

Here are two of my favorites from down by the lake.  These are just backlit shots exposed for the shadows on the face.





I'll leave you with this smiley face!

Not even sure where to start with this post.  My great friend Mark Morgan (mmorganphotography) and I shot another wedding recently.  There's so much to say about this one. 

There's a lot photographically but also personal as well. 



OK let's get the personal stuff out of the way first.  The families represented at this wedding were awesome!  They pretty much adopted Mark and I and made us feel like a part of the family for the night.  It was a true blessing to be involved.  To see the love that this bride and groom had for each other was amazing.  And the love that they had for their families was incredible.  The pastor that performed the ceremony was the groom's father.  During the toasts, the groom shared about his father's battle with cancer.  He has survived 6 times as I recall.  A great blessing and I pray for many more years that this father can enjoy his son and new daughter-in-law. 



I hope we can continue the fast friendships that we started at this wedding.  They brought a band from SC.  Made up of long time friends.  And world-class musicians.  Wow.  Being a bass player I payed close attention to the bassist in the band.  Soooo good!  Arggh.  Inspired me to pick it up some after the wedding.


Now to the photographic stuff since this is primarily a photography blog.  We attended the rehearsal dinner the night before.  We discussed the possibility of adding flash.  Where to put them?  How to trigger them?  Put that decision off until the day of to see what the weather brought.  They were going to make their weather call around 2pm.  Around 2pm that day it was raining and thundering.  We were hoping that the weather would break so they could have the ceremony outside with the beach as the background.  The wedding party was apparently praying hard about this because the weather broke into the most beautiful light.  It made the arch glow.  The ocean met the sky and at times you couldn't see the horizon.

So I shot the entire ceremony and formal portraits with ambient light.  That was good for the relaxation factor.  With flash I feel I'm always waiting for Mr. Murphy to visit and cause triggers not to work or batteries to be dead, and so on. 


The final product is great in my humble opinion.  These two were having so much fun that it was easy to get great results.

The reception was held in a conference room type thing.  With the ubiquitous white drop ceilings (God obviously loves photographers) which make great soft boxes when you shoot strobes up at them.  So we set up two monolights.  These were to bring up the overal light level.  I was shooting at f2.8 at iso 400 or iso 500 most of the night.  f2.8 gives the great out of focus backgrounds.  They were triggered optically.  So I carried around my camera with my Canon 540EZ in my hand.  I triggered that one with the radio triggers.  So the one in my hand would fire the larger monolights when it fired.  By holding the small strobe in my hand which was connected to my extended arm, it satisfied my need for off camera flash and gave some direction for the key light. 


I wish I had planned this but I can't.  Because of where we placed the monolights, only the one on the side of the room you were on would fire.  So you can see in the cake shot below that the key light is provided by the monolight behind me and to the left.  The monolight on the other side of the room didn't fire so I dragged the shutter a bit to allow the decorative lighting to burn-in.

What a great couple and a great wedding.  Bear with me please.  There are a lot of photos following but I am very happy with them.  My friend Mark and I teamed up for another wedding.  We have come to the conclusion that having two shooters is the way to go.  If you are involved in the planning of any weddings, please think of including us.

So I provided the Bride and Groom 3 sets of photos: normal color, aged, and black & white.  I am including some of the aged set here as they are my personal favorite and this is my blog so I get to decide (some small nugget of something that I have control over).

Things happen so fast at a wedding so in the following photos there are examples of natural light and natural light filled with strobe flash.