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.

Update | 28th February 2011

1. Wedding Portfolio

As well as using this blog as a way to convey my photography be it personal or professional, I would also like to start using it to share what it is that I am currently up to. At the moment I have a few things to report on. Firstly I have been working some time at producing my first wedding portfolio, something which is long overdue and that I have needed to do for some time. I have collected what I believe to be my best wedding photographs and I am narrowing them down. Hoping to show the best of the best of my wedding photographs. But as you can imagine it is a slow process as there are quite a few to go through. Below I have placed a few photographs as examples of what I may put into my wedding portfolio.

2. Shooting A Wedding

To help with my general indecisiveness I am going to be getting help choosing which are the best from a talk I am attending at Zoom In. Zoom In is a popular photography charity based in Oval in London. Zoom In is an organisation that I plan to be volunteering at in the future. As well as talks Zoom In offer darkroom and studio rental as well as a whole host of other services. If you would like to see what it is they do and more of the services that they offer feel free to click the link below that will take you to their website or if you follow the alternate link you can ‘like’ them on Facebook.

Zoom In’s Website
Zoom In’s Facebook Page

The talk is 1^st of April this year and it to be hosted be Leighann Lacey. The talk is entitled ‘Shooting a wedding?’ It that will cover the basics of wedding photography and it will also cover marketing which is the part of wedding photography that I need to brush up on.

As far as I am aware there are still spaces on the talk available if it sounds like something that would interest you. It costs only £7 and all the relevant information on the talk and also contact details to book can be found on the Facebook event page which I shall link to below.

Shooting A Wedding Information

I will be taking examples of the photographs that I want to include in my wedding portfolio to the talk and hopefully getting some feedback and constructive criticism on the photographs.

Also if you would like to check out some of Leighann’s photography below is a link to her site.

3. Video

I am thinking of introducing [in the next few months] a new side to this blog and I intend on doing that by way of video portions to the posts. This will initially present itself in two ways. The first will be that of video counterparts to the mainly text posts that I place on the blog. the meaning of these would be to show equipment, techniques and locations used during shoots. These can be added to the first part of the post as an introduction to the shoot and also covering some of the aspects that will be covered in the text.

The second way that I will introduce video to this blog will be by creating instructional videos where I can. I am not professing to be an expert in all things photography but feel that there would be certain things that I could show or i anyone has any ideas feel free to get in touch.

Doing this will be good for helping me to strengthen my video and editing skills. The videos themselves will be added to my Vimeo and Youtube accounts and then simply embedded onto the post. Below I have included a link to my Vimeo account if you wish to check some of the videos out. The videos aren’t at all exciting as like I said before I am using this exercise to improve my skills in this area also as I did not have the capability to edit any of the videos they are all straight from camera.

My Personal Vimeo Account

4. Focus On Imaging

And for my fourth and final update today I got my tickets through recently for the Focus On Imaging convention at the National Exhibition Centre [NEC] in Birmingham. The convention runs from Sunday the 6th of March to Wednesday the 9th March and it comes to pass once a year and is Europe’s biggest annual imaging show.

Focus On Imaging covers pretty much every step of the photographic process, with stands showing the latest in camera technology and output software. As well as manuactures, there will be talks, demonstrations and workshops. I amvery excited to be going along this year.

If you would like more information or you would like to gather more information for yourself feel free to click the link below.

Focus On Imaging Website

I hope that you have enjoyed this update. If you wish to contact me feel free to go to the contact page for details of my e-mail address and my Twitter account.

Wedding Photography | Rick and Joanne Squires

This blog entry is long overdue and not through lack of trying or holiday laziness but mainly due to the fact that I’ve never been happy with the previous drafts that I have previously produced. Expect to see more posts on this blog and a higher quality of writing that I shall try and deliver in future.

The first blog post of 2011 will cover the photography that I produced at the wedding of Rick and Joanna Squires. This was the last wedding of 2010 that I photographed and I found it very enjoyable as I do with most weddings. Although, this particular wedding was different as I personally knew the majority of the wedding party as well the bride and groom.

I have found recently that the majority of my paid work does come from weddings and I am happy about this. I enjoy all of it. Meeting up with the couple, location scouting [this is important so that you are prepared for where you will be photographing the group shots] and the all-round preparation make weddings enjoyable to photograph.  As always I met up with the bride and groom to discuss what photographs they wanted in terms of group shots and whether they had any special requests. Which they did, they requested that as well as using my standard wedding camera kit which consists of my Canon EOS 50D digital SLR using a combination of the Canon 28mm f1.8 lens, a Canon 50mm f1.8 lens, a Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 lens and my Canon external flash. They also requested that I take a few photographs after the reception using my Lomography Fisheye2 camera.

If you are a reader of this blog you may have seen my post on the Lomography Fisheye2 camera that I wrote some time ago. The post mainly consists of general shots taken whilst out with the camera and I have placed a link below.

General Photography |Lomo Fisheye 2
Date Posted: Monday 16^th August 2010

The Lomo Fisheye 2 is very versatile for a toy camera and the hotshoe atop of it allows me to use my Canon Speedlite 430EX [which I had taken along with me as part of my standard kit for a wedding]. The Lomo 2 also has the ability to take bulb exposures and whilst in this setting the flash goes off when you let go of the shutter as opposed to when you first press it down. This allows for some great low-light flash photography from this camera.

This wedding was a lot more fun and informal than weddings that I have photographed previously and this was why it was easy to experiment with the Fisheye camera later in the night without seeming intrusive to the guests.

As I have done with previous weddings, with this post you will see quite a few diptychs and triptychs as I find this the most effective way of telling a story through photos and also a really convenient way to get more photographs in.

The wedding took place at the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath and I took the group photographs on the heath itself. There are 17 photographs in this post including one of my favourite wedding photographs so far. This photograph consists of the lovely couple and a 53 bus. The Fisheye shots are quite distictive and are the last two hots on this post.

Please enjoy the photographs, if you have any questions feel free to get in contact via Twitter or the Contact page. Or feel free to leave a comment page on this blog post. Thanks.

Wedding Photography | Lucy And Martin Gunn

It has been noted in an e-mail that I had received recently that the majority of work that has been posted on this photography blog consists of mainly personal projects. The blog seems to mainly be portraiture, travel blogs and things of that nature. So I have decided to place some of my wedding photography up on the site. As well as the e-mail a strong reason for this is because I am photographing a wedding in November in London. I have decided to show some of my wedding photography taken during the summer of this year.

The wedding that I have placed on this particular post is that of a wedding that I photographed in July of this year. The wedding and reception were in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey. The Isle of Sheppey is a small island situated in North Kent. I found the entire day even more interesting because I had never actually been there before.

For this wedding I was second photographer to Mike Allchin of Spikesfotos [I will place a link below]. But even though I wasn’t main photographer for this wedding I was happy with the shots that I produced.

I have to admit there is a strong lack of my wedding photography on the site and I will aim to rectify this whilst still placing up posts of portraiture work and so forth. One of the things that I have learnt from photographing weddings with Mike is how to control a crowd with seeming bossy. The shots on the beach were my favourite from the day.

For this wedding I used my Canon EOS 50D digital SLR and as a change of tact I used a combination of all three of my commonly used lenses for the canon. Usually I would only use the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 of a combination of the Canon EF 28mm f1.8 and the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 but on this day I decided to use all three. I also used a Nikon D80 with a 70-300mm lens on it as well as a back up camera but preferred the images I got from the Canon. I had my Canon Speedlite 430EX flashgun with me also that day but I find that although a flashgun is an essential piece of equipment for Wedding and Event photography I rarely use them. I have always preferred the photographs you get from using available light. That is just my own personal opinion on the matter.

I may continue using all three lenses in regards to future weddings. This is because, although it was more cumbersome, I felt that I had better control on deciding between the quality of the branded Canon lens over the versatility and focal range of the Sigma lens. As well as that I managed to have a lot of fun with this wedding. Which isn’t highly unusual as I find Weddings great things to photograph.

In this post I have included 14 photographs. You may have noticed that they have not been watermarked, this is because I am currently away from my own laptop and as such am unable to sufficiently edit the photographs. I may replace them with watermarked versions in the future. As you probably know, I have posted wedding material on this blog previously so in addition to the link to Spikesfotos I am also going to place links to the other wedding posts for your perusal.

Professional Photography
Spikesfotos

Wedding Photography | Karen And Andy
Date Posted: Tuesday, 11^th August 2009

Wedding Photography | Emma And Liam Jackson
Date Posted: Tuesday, 20^th July 2010

Work on my official photography website has started and I’m very excited about the prospect. Once that is complete I am going to start advertising more and should get a lot more work. If you feel that you would like to get in touch with me for any reason, maybe to do with photography or just general questions. Then feel free to use the methods outlined on the Contact page above.

NOTE: For the images comprised of two or three photographs be sure to click the photo to see it larger and it correct proportion. Thanks.