ellipsis…

a couple of weekends back i had the privilege of photographing my bestfriend’s sister’s wedding, Sharon & Jordan. it’s always fun when you know the people you are working for. it’s even better when you know a lot of people you’ll be around. the day couldn’t have been better… except for the police. i’m not going to get into the specifics of what happened, but during my family session a couple wasn’t very happy with us and decided to call the cops. we weren’t disturbing anyone or doing anything wrong, we were in a public park. really just seemed like they needed a bone to pick, so they decided it would be us. luckily one of the groomsmen is a cop and actually knew the officer that arrived on scene. i was only able to snap a couple of pictures with the cop car before we were told it was probably best we were on our way.

the fun didn’t stop there. one of the locations we had decided on was McDougall School in downtown Calgary. after grabbing images of the party and a couple of just Sharon & Jordan, a huge crew of BMXers descended onto the grounds. it was quite the scene actually. we ended up asking if we could take some pictures with them. one of them, Mr. Michael Poos, even offered up his bike for a couple of the shot. really really fun, and very Sharon, who is a super spontaneous tomboy.

it was a wedding of firsts. first time someone called the cops on my wedding party. first time having a crew of BMXers descend on my bride & groom. and… first time using a slave flash at the reception. i’ve always seen it done by the pros, like the legendary Mike Colon, but i have never tried it myself. i must say it works really really well. it adds a nice dimension to the images. i didn’t really do anything special; threw a SB-800 up on a stand, set it on TTL and let the the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) do the rest. the results were quite nice. the only beef i have with CLS is that the signal is transferred via IR which is line-of-sight, so sometime the slave wouldn’t fire because something or someone was blocking the signal. all of that will be remedied when the new Pocket Wizards TT1n and TT5n are released later this summer.

SB-800 is behind and to the left.

i’ve cut down my weddings this year so that i can start to concentrate on more commercial work, but i must say i love the amount of creative freedom a wedding has. plus everyone you’re working with is dressed to the nines and looking their absolute best. here a couple more images from the day.

i just started reading Miss at la Playa, a blog about everything fashion and some other fun stuff. a couple of days ago she wrote about this little robot called Tweenbots. Kacie Kinzer from Tisch School of the Arts in NYU created a robot that is human-dependent to help it navigate around obstacles. so far every attempt to go from point A to point B has been successful with only the help of passing pedestrians. this is super cool, take a look.