Wedding Photography | Tim And Suzanne Jones

Weddings, weddings, weddings.

I wonder whether it’s just me or whether others have noticed that it’s somewhere in the air recently, constantly being brought up like a fever gripping the nation. The topic of weddings and marriage comes up in casual conversation and seeming that I have not been married myself, the only input that I can place into these matrimonial conversations is mainly as the photographer, the fly on the wall, sent there to record and preserve the memory of what is going to be for some, the greatest day of their adult lives.

I have thought about it and it seems that I have only ever been to two weddings where I was not the photographer and that number doesn’t seem to be going up any time soon. My wedding portfolio is slowly being put together, the biggest hurdle of this project was to just do it, and my method could have been slightly easier. My bright idea was to put ALL of the wedding photos that I’ve ever taken (a few thousand) in one folder and go through them one by one, wedding by wedding, deciding which of them I felt were worthy of being shown in a portfolio. I managed to get the grand total from a few thousand down to around 300 images with more to be cut. This process of elimination will be aided by friends and colleagues and soon I’ll be able to show prospective clients my body of work. Till then, I have this blog.

Whilst going through the images, I noticed that there were a few weddings that didn’t have a blog post. But, there was one in particular that caught my eye; this was the wedding of Tim and Suzanne Jones in August of 2011. By the look of my WordPress drafts I had tried to a few times to write a post about this wedding but to no avail. I find the blog posts about wedding harder to write as it always seems difficult to word them. But I decided to scrap the drafts and write a new post from scratch. Seeming that this wedding took place in August may mean that I forget a few of the salient details so for that forgive me.

The ceremony took place on a lovely August afternoon in St. Paul’s church in Mill Hill East. A little piece of advice to anyone photographing a weekend event in Mill Hill East, there is no direct Northern Line service to Mill Hill East on the weekends. St Pauls Church was designed by the architect William Wilberforce and had recently undergone a £2,000,000 refurbishment and it showed with the church looking amazing which led to some photographs that I am really happy with.

I received some compliment on the day on the speed and professionalism that was displayed when I was taking the formal group shot. My standard group shot list (which is available to couples upon meeting) is designed so that I can efficiently get the formal shots done quickly which means that people don’t look tired or bored after having had to wait for ages for their turn to come around. After the group shots were taken we were driven to the venue of the reception Beales Hotel in Hertfordshire. The Beales Hotel is a lovely hotel with large windows which I found very helpful for the informal shots of the guests awaiting the arrival of the bride and groom. The main reception room was set out in a purple and white colour scheme which was also the colour scheme of the wedding as you may or may not have been able to tell from the photographs, which I’m sure you have probably already looked at before reading this. I had so much fun photographing this wedding and I was really pleased with the results I produced, more importantly so were the bride and groom.

As I said earlier in the post, weddings have been coming up in conversation recently and what I have found is this, whenever I mention that my only real experience of weddings is as the photographer people seem to think of this as a scary task, even photographers I’ve spoken to tend to shy away. But I thoroughly enjoy photographing weddings, it’s my chance to use skills that I have built up over of many years and people at weddings are generally there to have a good time, it’s a celebration, so as long as you’re ok mixing with groups of people you’ve never met before it should be easy. A couple of my major pieces of advice for wedding and events photography and photography in general is to dive in and get the shot because that moment is more than likely not going to arrive again, that, and to remember to look behind you. You never know what photos you could be missing out on by just facing forwards the whole time. Then again, that’s really what a second photographer is for. Allowing you not focus so much on what’s going on everywhere around you. But we’ll go into that at a later date.

In this post there are sixteen photographs spanning the entire day, from Tim waiting just before Suzanne’s arrival to the church to the cutting of the cake and the first dance. They were taken on a Canon EOS 50D using a Canon EF-S 17-85mm lens and my trusty Canon Speedlite 430EX flashgun. If you look at these photographs and you find that you are interested in having me as your photographer for your wedding please feel free to contact me at the email address I’ve placed below. I have a price list and standard wedding shot list and soon I will have my portfolio available for view upon meeting.

richardanthonymorris@gmail.com

P.S I remembered as I was writing this post that I recorded a short video of one of the tables at the wedding reception, which became known during the day as the rowdy table.

Portraiture Photography | Tommi Gibbons

Photographing a wedding is always a big deal and shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you have been chosen to photograph someone’s wedding day they have entrusted you with the responsibility of their special day. A once in a lifetime event that cannot be repeated, I mean you’ve heard it all before, but imagine having your equipment fail because you hadn’t pre-checked it, shrugging and going home. I’d be very surprised if you managed to get another wedding for some time.

Pre-wedding day every photographer (that I know) has their own ritual, their own way of preparing for the monumental task at hand. But, I don’t know their rituals so I can only give you mine and my ritual generally starts about a week (or more) before the actual wedding day.

Now, by ritual, I don’t mean meeting with the bride and groom and deciding on a pre-set photo list. That should have been done weeks or better yet months before the actual wedding day. No, in today’s post what I mean by ritual could otherwise be described as the checking over of all equipment that you tend to use on the wedding day.

Now I find that I am never really satisfied with just sitting in my home using the camera for a few shots and giving it all the a-OK. I’m just a bit more picky than that. With my equipment I like to go over everything and the only real way I know to do that would be to go  out and take photographs, mainly portraits. Because you want to see how the lens/camera/memory card/etc reacts to real world use. So what I do is arrange meet ups with people I know and give them free portraits for the chance to help me test out my equipment.

As well as helping me test my equipment it also gives me something to write about on this blog and I can also get enough footage from my camera to make a video. Today’s video (which should be above) is more of a video blog from my day than anything which you’ll learn from, but you may enjoy it. Even though I am taking portraits of friends of mine at the time I am more focused (if you’ll excuse the pun) on what my camera is doing.

First off, it’s best to check that the auto focus is working correctly (you would be surprised how often it isn’t). When that has been checked I then check the lens on manual focus,  just to make sure that the focusing ring doesn’t get stuck at any point and if it feels a little stiff then it’s best to know this before the wedding day. Once I’ve taken few shots with one lens I then switch over to another and start all over again. Today I was testing out the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 and the Canon EF 28mm f1.8, I was especially eager to test out the Sigma as I had only received it back from repair a few days ago and I needed to make sure that it was working correctly. Like I said earlier, you should test every piece of kit that you are going to be using on the day. I am probably going to also be using my Canon EF 50mm f1.8 and I’ll definitely be using my Canon flashgun so I’ll test those out on my next portrait shoot which will probably be next week.

It’s not just about the lens either; you have to keep an eye on your camera. Just after taking the photograph I’m keeping a mental note of how fast the images are being saved. A fast memory card is a must with Wedding Photography. I generally don’t keep an eye on the battery, this is because two days before the wedding day I charge all my batteries.

So, as I said earlier in today’s post we have Tommi sitting in for me and all the photographs below were taken with the Canon EF 28mm f1.8 except for the first one. I wouldn’t expect portfolio quality shots from today’s post but I am still happy with the results, also, the shots were taken pretty much whenever I remembered that I had a camera on me.

Just before a wedding I tend to doubt my abilities and add that to the fact that I haven’t done any photography recently means that these tests are far more beneficial that usual. Oh, expect some gig shots in about three weeks, just saying.

Documentary Photography | St Phillips, Aldwych

This blog, in its heyday (and it’s had a few) was a twice weekly photographic blog exploring a broad range of subject matter and photographic techniques. All of it written by myself in my spare time and all the photographs taken by me also.

Each post was generally written in one go, with some taking a bit longer. There are about 53 posts on the blog (not including this one) and seeming that I am not a writer by any measure I’m quite surprised that I managed to write that much. Photography is a passion, it’s my passion, it’s what I do and what I’m known for. From time to time I try to write and that’s the main reason that the posts on the blog have progressively increased in size since I started this blog all the way back in August of 2009.

But I’m not done yet.

Earlier on today I was looking at photography jobs and saw a role taking photographs in a theatre. On the job post it said to send a CV and a link to a website/blog and as I added the link to this site and I realised that I had not placed a post on here since photographing my younger brother’s band on the 15^th of May. This calls for two things, the first is a short apology for the lack of posts I’m not sure if this blog had regular readers but I can guess that no posts may have been annoying. Secondly, a return to blogging, photography, writing, videos and such.

And so we begin.

Out of context, today’s photographs, and the video for that matter will seem kind of strange. If you skipped the text of today’s post you will have seen shots of empty hallways and photographs of people laying down on the floor taken at a very high ISO. Saying that, I have to say that the video is kind of dark but if does give a great explanation of the monochrome images and the context with which they should be taken in. So, I shall begin to explain the first set of photographs.

First off, the photographs of the empty hallways do have some meaning to them. They were taken in the St. Phillips building in Alwych which is on the campus of the London School of Economics. And the reason that you find photographs of empty hallways and gutted rooms in this post is because St. Phillips had been emptied out prior to it being handed over. This handing over will ultimately result in this building being demolished. Work on which, has started long before I wrote this post. The reason for this I place to taking so long to write this particular post.

There are certainly a few things to be said about a building that is going to be demolished. The first of which that pops into the mind of quite a few people is simply “Who cares?” and I can understand what they mean. A city, like London, is never actually finished. It will continue to grow and evolve over time and there will be never be a point when nothing new is needed. But that shouldn’t mean that when a building is set to disappear we should ignore the history of that particular building. And that is what the exhibition that inhabited the St’ Phillips building shortly before it’s handing over was trying to convey.

I was thinking about this viewpoint on construction and deconstruction as I was walking [and photographing] my way through the empty hallways. But a couple of other thoughts were going through my mind. These thoughts mainly occurred when I was looking out of the third floor window.

“No one will ever see this exact view ever again. No one will see what I can now see and no-one will be able to stand here and see what I can’t either”

A certain view at a certain time can inspire quite a lot in people and it just kind of struck me that this building wouldn’t have that opportunity to inspire in the future. And that’s what I meant when I said that no-one will be able to see what I can’t. I look down and see a street; someone else could have looked down and wrote a novel.

I came to this by accident really. I had met one of the exhibitors, Jesse Darling, last year and I have had her as a Twitter contact for some time. I had asked whether or not she had anything that she wanted photographed and it was then that I was told about this exhibition and through that I learned a lot about the history of the building.

The exhibition “Students, Patients, Paupers” wished to celebrate the history and the many roles played by the St. Phillips building. Some of which include a venereal hospital, a work house and a dentist’s practice among others. These are but a few of the roles this building has performed over the past century.

I was there on Wednesday the 11^th of May where as well as Jesse Darling’s exhibition piece “Live Sleeping Event” there was also a public symposium going over the history of the building and the idea of construction and deconstruction.

Like I mentioned above, I am not a writer. A good example of which is this post, that I’ve been trying to write this since May. This building has a rich history and an interesting one. But, for some reason I find it hard to write about empty hallways, except to say, that a lot of history has passed through them. But I don’t just want to give you a history lesson. If you would like to know more please visit the link below.

http://stphilips.tumblr.com/

But for now, I shall simply show you the photographs and the video, before I break right through the thousand word barrier without having said very much.

Music Photography | Cardboard Cutouts

Any band that I have photographed in the past knows that I love to do gig shots in monochrome. This is mainly because, through experience, I have found that venues tend to want to create an atmosphere and this usually is achieved through the use of awkward-to-photograph-with lighting. If it isn’t constantly changing colour it’s a colour that the white balance doesn’t know how to cope with. If you have found yourself in this situation then you will also know that manually adjusting the white balance hardly ever works. There are obviously ways around this, an external flash gun for example. But I really hate using flash guns if I can help it.

Another thing to add is that when it comes to gig photos I like to do it all manual, like I used to do with my film cameras. Part of it is guess work, but a big part is being able to step back and look at where you want to photograph and knowing what your exposure should be. One of my hidden talents is that I’m pretty good at guessing exposures at ISO 400 [even going again the advice of a light meter at times]. So when you’re on ISO 1600 it’s just a case of maths.

I had been thinking the other day that it had been some time since I had taken any gig photos and a little while later my younger brother told me about a gig that he and his friend Dave were doing on Friday the 13^th of May.

I had first started doing gig photography by contacting bands that enjoyed the sound of if they wanted any photos taken at an upcoming gig. This was usually done through Myspace, back when I had one. And then there were my friends that were musicians and I would attend their gigs and take photos accordingly, always loving the challenge of manual photography in such a hectic lighting set-up. This isn’t the first set of gig photos that I am placing on this blog. Click the photo links below to be taken through to my other music related posts on this blog.

Although the shots of Jason were taken with an Olympus OM-10 film SLR, the photos taken at the Adventure Starts Tomorrow gig and in today’s post and all were taken on the Canon EOS 50D using a combination of lenses. This camera was used at the request of my younger brother. This was mainly because he wanted to learn more about RAW photography with the shots.

The gig itself went really well, even though it was on Friday the 13^th. The boys went through some brilliant covers, clips of which can be found in the video embedded above. I suggest giving it a view, also at the very end of it my younger brother and I do a recital of the PokeRap. Which I’m sure has swayed all of you. Hope you enjoy the video and the photos and I hope you have enjoyed reading this post.

One more thing, one of the hardest things to do in gig photography in my opinion is taking photos of the drummer, they are usually in the back with little to no lighting and they generally move around the most.