I Survived Being a Wedding Photographer

Despite the fact that I was nervous as all hell the day of the wedding, I managed to pull off some decent wedding photos. I say “decent” because everyone else seems to think they’re great, but this is the benchmark I’m comparing myself to (they go to my church), so they’re just “decent” to me. But hey, it’s good to have a goal to shoot for, right? Someday I’ll be as good as Dave and Quin. 🙂 I had a hard time with the lighting, trying to control my flash + LightSphere combination, and the fact that the Catholic priest told me I could only take photos at four opportunities during the service, and I couldn’t move anywhere other than a 180 degree arc behind the bride and groom. Here are a few random photos from the wedding ceremony (and just before it).

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(this photo was taken by Ashley – mad photo skillz are inherent to the Dunn household!)

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Funny thing is, the outdoor wedding I turned down shooting (I was recording the video, those pictures were taken mostly by Ashley) would have probably been  a cakewalk compared to shooting inside the church. My confidence as a wedding photographer was boosted by this whole experience, that’s for sure.

Loving Fast Lenses

Last weekend I took my Nikon D200 and my 50mm prime lens, the cheap F1.8 one, out for a spin. I’ve had poor (blurry) results from this lens in the past because I think I had adapted my shooting style leaning on the image stabilization in the 18-200mm lens as a crutch. The 50mm prime lens has no image stabilization, so if I’m not steady, the photos are blurry. I focused more on stability, and the photos came out fantastic – the early evening summer lighting was soft and glorious, making every shot look superb. Here are a few of my favourite shots from the shoot.

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12 x 12″ Paper and FotoFusion: A Great Combination

Since installing and reviewing v4 of FotoFusion, I’ve been really enjoying using it to create photo layouts – it’s amazing how quickly I can whip one up, and it’s equally amazing how quickly I can remove frames, resize them, and keep them locked into the grid so everything is clean looking. I ordered some 12″ by 12″ matte paper from an eBay seller a few weeks ago, and I decided to combine the two: creating a photo layout with FotoFusion and printing it out on the 12″ x 12″ paper. Here was the result:

This is such a fantastic way to create a unique, great way of remembering an event: I’m hooked and I suspect I’ll be printing many more 12 x 12″ prints in the future. I printed up several of these and gave them to a few of the people involved, and they all loved them. Scenarios such as this are when I feel I’m most successful with technology: when I can take useful software, a bit of photographic skill, a nice printer, and create something that people can cherish for years to come. That’s when technology works as it should.

Wheels for the World Photos Posted

A couple of weeks ago, on June 3rd, the church I attend (RockPointe) had a fund-raising event for AIDS and extreme poverty prevention as part of a “Compassion in Action” push we’re doing as a congregation. They did it in an interesting way: they got together some of the most exotic and unique cars in western Canada, charged $100 a ticket, and put on a first-class event with food, entertainment, and an awesome assortment of jaw-dropping cars. Then then asked the nice (mostly) rich people who attended to reach deep and donate what was within their means. The final tally isn’t quite in, but at last count this event raised $115,000 – is that amazing or what? Calgary is such a financially blessed city, and it’s nice to see some of those people giving to a good cause. I attended the event and was the official event photographer. Here are a few pictures of some mighty lovely cars…

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You can check out the full gallery over on my photo site, and you can even order prints if you like an image you see.

RockPointe “Compassion in Action” Photo Shoot

On Sunday the 18th of March, 2007, members of RockPointe church, along with interested visitors, assembled in the Crowfoot movie theatres to view a message from U2’s Bono and Bill Hybles about combating AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. It was, frankly, a nightmare to shoot because of the low lighting. The ultra-high ceilings in most locations made a flash bounce impossible, so I ended up shooting without a flash for most of the shots. The end result is ISO 1600, fairly grainy photos – some of which I transformed into black and white where the grain helps the image have more impact. Looking at them at smaller sizes (sub-1000 pixels), they don’t look too bad actually. That’s the thing I always forget about ISO noise, odds are few people are going to be staring at the photos on a 24″ LCD monitor running at 1920 x 1200 like I am…and when the photos are smaller, the ISO noise tends to vanish.

This was my first real use of Adobe Lightroom, and I was quite impressed with it (for the most part) – look for a review of it on Digital Media Thoughts. Here’s a selection of some of my favourite B&W images…

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You can check out the rest of the gallery if you wish.

The Windows Vista Wallpapers That Didn’t Make It…

Hamad Darwish is an amazingly talented photographer who had some of his work selected for the wallpaper backgrounds in Windows Vista. His work is extremely impressive, and I find the high-contrast, super-saturated effect stunning (it’s what I tend to try for myself with my own photos, though they’re nowhere near as great as these of course ;-)).

He’s been generous enough to release 22 high resolution (1920 x 1200) images to the public, ones that didn’t make the cut into Vista. Microsoft’s loss is our gain! And because the bandwidth requirements were causing problems for his one and only download location, I’ve offered Thoughts Media resources to host the download for him, and we’re now an official mirror.

So if you want it, click here to download (31 MB ZIP file).

A Fun Photo Project

I did a fun photo experiment on Digital Media Thoughts today, and it turned out quite well. Here’s the result:

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You can download a 1600 x 1200 sized version for square-screen wallpaper purposes.