I didn’t get copies of the photos from the borrowed camera until just recently, and just finished going through and editing. This is the first wedding I’ve ever shot, with any sense of responsibility for capturing the whole thing. Lots of rookie amateur mistakes in there. It’s amazing how fast things happen in a wedding, when you’re trying to capture it all. And how quickly the lighting goes south – the wedding took place on a beach, just before sunset, so we had amazing light for most of it, and then harsh oblique shadows at the end. I didn’t have any lights aside from the on-camera flash, so things got messy in a hurry. Thankfully, I pumped off about a thousand frames – whittled down to 80-something.
It was an absolutely beautiful ceremony – both in the setting (on the beach in Playa del Carmen, Mexico), and in the casual relaxed fun feeling throughout – the bride and groom were both laughing through much of the ceremony. So much fun.
If I were to shoot a wedding again, I would do things a bit differently. For starters, I’d use my own camera (mine was out of action that week – sensor far to messed up to risk shooting a wedding with it). I’d shoot RAW (the borrowed camera didn’t have room on the card to handle more than JPEG if I was going to shoot around 1000 frames. I’d have proper lights. I’d maybe have 2 cameras ready – one with a long lens for closeups, one with a wide lens for catching the scene.
We actually had 3 shooters for the wedding – myself, my nephew Jordan (brother of the bride) and his wife Kelsey (who was a bridesmaid, and has a fantastic sense of artistic direction) – photos on their faceplace, and my son (9, with his own camera). With them all combined, I think we actually did a surprisingly good job at shooting the wedding.
