This wedding freaked me out!
I have a recurring nightmare. The wedding day is almost over. I've been at the wedding all day, and I realize I forgot to take any pictures. It's the wedding photographer version of dreams you have years after school that you've forgotten to take a test.
What has that got to do with this wedding, you ask? Well, usually right after the ceremony, I go off with the bride and groom and do couple's portraits. But Elyse and Simon didn't want to do that. Instead, they wanted to socialize with their guests. Then dinner time came, speeches, and dances, and it wasn't until it was almost time for me to leave that I convinced them to take a few minutes for couple's pictures. I think I could have left without doing so and they would have been perfectly happy, but for me, it was a profoundly strange experience to not even have one picture of the bride and groom together, looking at the camera. So I kinda forced them to pose for me. It just resonated with my dreams a little too much: a wedding had gone by and I had not taken posed pictures of the couple.
The couple was lovely, very kind and ready for a good time. Elyse is just shy of 5 feet tall, Simon is well over 6 feet tall, so it was the greatest high disparity of a couple I've experienced. But as you will see in the pictures, they meld together so well that it...just works.
Another interesting thing about this wedding is that the ceiling was black and the walls were red, which meant it was dark, dark, dark in there. Often we photographers will use natural light or bounce our light off a white wall, but that wouldn't work here. Fortunately, I know lighting, so I was able to light everyone well, despite the dark walls and ceiling.
Added to that is the first time I've photographed a ceremony in the middle of a staircase, and it was quite a fun experience.
