Imagine the excitement when your childhood best friend asks you to capture his wedding day. When JP was a kid he spent his summers in Muskoka and their next door neighbours were their best friends.
The kind of friends where you wake your mom up everyday at an ungodly hour and beg her to let you run next door to play mini sticks and monopoly. The kind of friends where your parents are forced to instate a rule that you can’t go to the Kaptyns until 7 am, and you get so good at monopoly that you know what every spot of the board is worth. Yes, even Baltic and Mediterranean avenue.
It’s always interesting when friends or family ask you to be their photographer because it really ups the pressure level beyond what can already be a high pressure situation.
Weddings have got to be the toughest thing to photograph, because there are no re-do’s. When we’re shooting commercial projects, we can always do another take, or coach our models to get the perfect shot. But with weddings, you have to be hypersensitive to everything that is going on and ready to capture all the little moments. When mom wipes a tear from her eye, or dad cracks a joke that has everyone laughing, you have to nail it.
So the pressure is always on to capture these micro moments and blow our clients away. But this one felt extra special. That being said, anyone who knows Lisa and Al knows that they are the most easy going and laid back couple on the planet, so they made it easy for us.
The wedding was gorgeous. The quintessential Muskoka wedding at their cottage on Lake Rosseau, but with lots of fun twists that screamed Lise and Al. Picture a desert bar with make your own ice cream sandwiches, a smore roasting station with three different flavours of marshmallows, french onion soup dumplings and fireworks at the end of the night that were absolutely bananas (watch the vid!).
The wedding was in front of the water, which was gorgeous. But it ended up being tricky to shoot given the lighting conditions, especially during the ceremony. There were trees above that didn’t shade the area entirely, but instead cast spotty uneven lighting over the guests. Photographers nightmare! But these things are unavoidable, so you just do your best to expose nicely to get the most even look.
It was also really windy during the ceremony so the bride and groom got a little wind blown during the vows. But everyone rolled with it and embraced the specialness of the moment. I mean, who really cares about a little wind when you’re marrying the love of your life in front of your best friends on earth. Wind, what wind?
During the family and couples portraits, we shoot on a variety of different lenses based on the look and feel we are going for. Going forward, we will likely shoot a lot of these portrait sessions with our new prime 85 mm f.1.4 to get the juicy shallow depth of field (bokeh), ability to shoot in low light without blasting the ISO and that classic pin sharp look that you get with primes. For this session we shot with a combination of the 70-200 f.2.8 and 24-70 f2.8 which are both great portrait lenses.
We also have started using a pretty awesome little technique that involves photo stacking. We shoot the odd group shot as a panorama and stitch the images together in post to create a really large, high res image. This technique works really well when you have limited space, but don’t want to use a wide angle. It also gives you the ability to get an image with everyone smiling with eyes open by blending and choosing the ideal faces. It also allows you to get a really large high res image with boca equivalent to an f1. It’s called the Brenizer method for any fellow photographers who are reading this and want to give it a try.
Given their laid back nature, the bride and groom weren’t concerned about spending too much time shooting the classic couple shots, so we kept the session short but sweet to get them back to the party. And they are the life of the party!
Picture wedding speeches that had people crying laughing, the bride rocking a sweat band during her speech, and a group photo taken from a shoe that they coined the “shoe selfie”. A smile till your face hurts kind of affair.
We kept this fun lighthearted vibe in mind when editing the video. From the music, to the flow. We really wanted to create something that fit their personalities and matched the vibe of the day.
In the end, they loved the images and video. We heard a few weeks later that the grooms mother bawled her eyes out when she saw the video, and does every time she watches it! That’s always a sign you captured the moment and struck an emotional cord, so that made us happy. It’s really fulfilling capturing such special moments in people’s lives. These are moments that they will look back on for the rest of their lives, show their kids and grandkids, so they are pretty special.
Alex’s sister Sam also loved the images and video, and asked us to come back to Canada in August to shoot her wedding at the same location. We are so excited to connect with everyone again and capture Sam’s special day.
Thanks Lisa and Alex for trusting us to capture the most important day of your lives. Seriously guys, it was an honour to be a part of it, and we can’t wait to see you both again in August for round two!
