29th Apr 2012, 8:25pm

I have so many beautiful weddings to share with you (and I got my hand smacked yesterday for not blogging enough! Sorry!!)

Back in January we took a wee roadtrip up to Auckland to photograph day 2 of Steve and Alisha's gorgeous wedding.  They had the traditional Indian wedding on the Saturday followed by the 'official' civil ceremony on the Sunday.  I wish I had been able to photograph both days but on the Saturday we were already booked...but Sunday was so beautiful I got over it!

Where to start?  Some beautiful details I hear you say?  Sure, why not...

and let's pop in a couple of adorable flowergirls...

How proud is Alisha's mum?  I love these two shots of her...

Rach was second shooting with me at this wedding and I actually squealed with delight as I was editing and came to these two shots of hers.  They were taken a split second apart and just tell such a story about the day...

After the ceremony we wandered along Takapuna Beach for some playing in the water, some smooching and some symmetry (definitely three things on my top 10 of favourite things to photograph)

And then we headed off to Mantells on the Water for the reception (I am in love with their stripes I tell ya)

It was such a gorgeous, relaxed day...we thoroughly enjoyed being a part of it!

Congratulations Steve and Alisha!

11th Apr 2012, 12:25pm

Diana and Ben's wedding at The Red Barn was just utterly filled with flowers...the wedding was beautiful and I'll post pics soon but the flowers deserve their own blog post!  The woman responsible is Monica Lindsay and if you like what you see you can contact her by email.  Check out this gorgeousness!

The rafters were entwined with ivy and everywhere else there were white, cream and green flowers in tin pails and vintage jars...

8th Apr 2012, 5:00pm

We're working our way through season 4 of Mad Men at the moment and I still haven't decided if I actually like any of the characters...and I have to confess I find some of the plotlines intensely depressing...but I think I may actually be watching it for the clothes and the hairstyles and the furniture anyway.

So when I arrived at Caroline's parent's place to photograph her preparations I decided I had died and gone to Mad Men heaven...check out these amazing details...

2nd Apr 2012, 8:38pm

Every photographer knows that hard drives are fickle beasts. We know that there is no such thing as 100% reliable and we know that every backup system has vulnerabilities.  We prepare for the worst all the time...which goes against my optimism in all other areas.  Because we know that hard drive failure is a question of when...not if.  It will happen, the trick is to minimise the loss and to minimise the down time as everything gets restored from backup.  I personally think wedding photographers get the worst of it...our work generates vast quantities of very precious data...we have more to lose in so many ways!

Anyway...this Saturday our number was up (like the opposite of Lotto).  As I was uploading the cards from the wedding I'd just shot my main computer just up and turned itself off...Stu eventually got it going again (it had overheated due to a jammed fan) but the short version of the story is we had to reformat the main drive.  It's a sickening feeling...just nauseating.

I knew we had backups in two other places and that we could rebuild it but it's still a slightly uncomfortable place to be.

In the end...after two days of restoring files, the only thing that's missing is some pictures from a family birthday last year that I hadn't backed up. I'm really proud of that. And even though I'd rather not go through it again, I know that we will.  And we'll have learned a bit more from this and we'll recover a bit better and a bit faster next time.

One of my takeaways from all of this is that even the family birthday pictures deserve to be backed up!

And I guess I want yours to be the same...if it was worth shooting in the first place, it's worth backing up!

28th Mar 2012, 10:23pm

On Saturday I was second shooting for Nikki South at a wedding in Rotorua.  When I arrived to photograph the guys getting ready the groom showed me a small cannon that they had set up.  An actual cannon, that fires cannon balls!  And he started asking questions about how many frames per second I could shoot...turns out he was keen to catch the fire trail as the cannon ball shot out of the mouth of the cannon. For real!  I started thinking about how I was going to do it...the technical challenges were not small; the darkness and the one-chance nature of the thing, the split second timing and the fact that it started raining about an hour before the scheduled time.  Let's say I wasn't exactly 100% confident that I could pull it off :-)

Which is why it was that much sweeter when, after some educated guesswork and some pushing of the cameras limits I checked the back of the camera and saw this:

Specs for the geeks: iso1600, f4, 1/160...shot on continuous high speed

And yes, I definitely did a happy dance!

All of which reminded me of another awesome wedding a while back where the couple, Gemma and Lester, told me that they were basically getting married at night and could I rise to the challenge? You can see their wedding album here and judge for yourself.  I love those images because they're different and because they were a challenge.

So I guess what I'm saying is ask about pushing the boundaries...challenge us!

26th Mar 2012, 9:49pm

At Kate and Paul's wedding (at the Red Barn) I saw the cutest idea for entertaining the guests at the reception while we were off doing photos...they had made up a special crossword where all the clues were questions about them.  They'd carefully chosen the clues so that no one person would be able to get all of them and so it was a great way to get everybody talking to the people at their table (and at the neighbouring tables).  I loved the idea so much I mentioned it to my sister who was getting married at the beginning of March...she loved it too so her and John made one for their wedding...

Great ideas definitely should be shared...

Thanks Kate and Paul!

25th Mar 2012, 9:04am

Yesterday I was very privileged to have the opportunity to second shoot with Nikki South which was quite good timing really since I've been thinking about the whole two wedding photographers vs one wedding photographer thing all week. I love shooting with other photographers; it's fun of course but it has some other important benefits. You learn a lot about yourself and your own style of shooting and it opens your eyes to different ways of doing things (whether you adopt them or reject them you've moved yourself forward a bit). And in the back of my mind I'm always aware that NZIPP photographers look out for each other and I might be called in to shoot for them in an emergency (or they for me)...which would be a lot easier if I've worked with them before.

So you know what the number one thing is that I have I learned from second shooting for other photographers?

We are all different.

It's quite simple really, but it has some important implications if you're reading this because you just got engaged and you're looking for a photographer.  Even photographers who create superficially similar looking pictures go about their creation in different ways...different ways of talking and interacting, different approaches to posing and setting up shots, different priorities when shooting.  And it pays to talk to photographers about these things because they're important. 

So that's it...my blinding revelation for the day: photographers are all different. Perhaps I need more coffee ;-)

And because I got a few complaints about fairness....here is a montage of me shooting...spot the goofy grin (and the wannabe bridesmaid!)

23rd Mar 2012, 7:39pm

After having a bit of a rave yesterday about how great it is to photograph weddings with a second photographer I thought it would be fun to actually introduce the regulars.

In no particular order...

This is Rach...she's been shooting with me the longest and since her work committments have changed she isn't available as often as before.  She's the master of finding out all the juicy details of the stag do, fixing hair, veils and dresses and she shoots a mean 'grooms reaction shot'.  She's also a bit of a poser (in a good way!) when it comes to testing the light.

This is Anita...

who is clearly better at avoiding my camera than the others because I could only find 2 pictures of her and one is a horrid iphone pic!  She's studying photography fulltime in Wellington but is up here often.  She's great at the whole 'different angles' thing and I love editing her shots because there are always cool surprises in there.

This is Bryce...

in his other life he runs an after school program so he's awesome with kids.  And he also shoots weddings for himself as BJ Photography.  Clearly he loves his work because he shoots with that silly grin on his face :-) (actually we kinda all do) and he rocks the natural light portraits of the guys.

And finally there's Pip...

who I found and recruited because she is a friend of my sisters on Facebook and she was doing a one a day project.  I kept seeing these really creative images popping up on my news feed...so I invited her to tag along on a wedding.  She got bitten by the bug and the rest is history!  Pip rocks the creative angles and I think her favourite thing is reflections...oh and there is nothing she won't do to get the shot. Nothing at all.

So that's my awesome team!  

I also want to give a shout out to the fabulous Delia Balle-Farrell who shot with me a couple of weeks back...she's clearly very ninja-like because I didn't get a single picture of her in action but she is responsible for this gorgeous shot of Aimee and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to share it again :-)

22nd Mar 2012, 9:37pm

I know it's one of those things you have to weigh up when you're looking for a photographer...do we really need a second shooter?  Is it really worth the extra money? 

I love shooting with a second photographer...I can shoot on my own and I have done it from time to time...but I always know where the gaps are.  I know the places where a second photographer would have caught a moment from a better angle.  I know that having two photographers means better, more complete coverage which means more memories.

One of the key jobs I give to my second shooters is to look for different angles, to take the time to be creative and take the 'not safe' shot (after the safe ones are in the bag of course).  So in answer to the questions about the benefit of a second shooter I am going to let the pictures do the talking...some of my favourite images captured by my fabulous second shooters...

(the image on the left is mine, on the right is Anita's)

And that, right there, is why I choose to work with a second photographer.  

I rest my case :-)

18th Feb 2012, 10:55pm

The dining room in the house where Victoria grew up has this wonderful wooden floor that was painted a long time ago and in the patch under the dining table the paint has been gradually worn away by chairs scraped in and out for a thousand family meals. And the finial at the top of the stairs is shiny, the paint long since polished away by hands. I love the way their family life is imprinted on this house...

Victoria lost her Mum a couple of years ago and the thing about losing a parent is there are special days when it doesn't matter how long it's been their absence is felt more keenly...weddings are those kind of days and Victoria and Jason made sure that they found lots of small ways to honour her memory.  The succulents in Victoria's bouquet were taken from a plant that originally grew from a cutting that her mum took from the succulents in her own wedding bouquet...how cool is that?

and the girls stopped by the cemetery for a drink with Mum...

The ceremony was beautiful...emotional and happy...I love the reactions going on in the background of this image...

Woodlands...Woodlands...what can I say?  Gorgeous gorgeousness in venue form!

Sometimes I think people just make our jobs too easy!

Thanks Victoria and Jason for sharing your beautiful day with us, it really was an honour :-)