Angela & Matt's Wedding

Angela and Matt got married on November 20th at St. Henry Roman Catholic Church in Bayonne, New Jersey.

This wedding presented a number of challenges for me - with the biggest being the cold and the daylight - but more on that later.




Angela got ready at the hotel - and it was a bit of a tight squeeze for portraits. There wasn't enough time to get everyone outside, so all the bridal portraits were done with a combination of window light, and a flashpoint daylight florescent softbox kit.






For Matt's portraits - we were able to use the stately exterior of St. Henry's Church.



The interior of the church is magnificent. So many beautiful details. The lighting was actually pretty good for a big old church like this. The Nikon 70-200 VRII was a big help here though.



Unfortunately due to time constraints, our last hour of daylight was spent traveling to the venue, the Park Avenue Club in Florham Park, NJ.





We shot some bride and groom portraits in their outdoor area - stretching the low light capabilities of my Nikon D300 to the max. I lit the couple with a pair of Doug Gordon torch lights to keep as much of the ambient light as possible.




We headed back inside - and used the softbox setup for a few shots using a curtain in the reception room.

All in all - I'm happy with the photos, considering the challenges I faced.

Jenny & Jim's Wedding

Jenny & Jim got married on a picture perfect day on August 14th at St. Frances Cabrini Church in Coram, New York.



Jenny got ready at her parent's house, so I used their front porch for some poses.



The guys were a fun bunch - and they were dying to do this photo.



I love the look of this old church, it's in the middle of a typical suburban town, but it has the look of an old country church.



This was a great group - I love when I can get a group shot like this after the ceremony!



There was about ten feet of space in the shade for formals - and I was under strict orders from the bride's father to be finished with photos before cocktail hour. So there was no waiting for better lighting conditions.

The Importance of Photography

With the proliferation of digital cameras, and the fact that today’s cell phones often include decent to quite good cameras themselves, it seems that people are taking photos more than ever before.

Add to that websites like facebook and flickr, and those photos are being shown to family, friends, and strangers halfway around the world – sometimes moments after they are shot.

This is quite an amazing leap forward in the world of photography. Never before has it been so easy to capture and share family memories.

Last month, my grandmother passed away at the age of 95. After the funeral, I asked my aunt to let me borrow a stack of about 200 photos of my grandmother’s life. Some of these photos dated back to the early 1930s (unfortunately there were none of her very early life – I suppose my great grandparents held on to those).



I put together a slideshow covering her life from her teenage years through her final months. It was an emotional experience to say the least. It was surreal just to be holding photos from 80 years ago. And to think here I was, scanning them onto my computer, cleaning up creases and smudges from decades ago, uploading them to my slideshow software, Animoto, and outputting a slideshow to high resolution DVD. I’m sure whoever shot those original photos (probably on a brownie box or something) could never have come close to imagining that 80 years later, I would be doing what I just did.



It’s impossible to know what kinds of technologies will exist 80 years from now. But there will be someone, like me, looking for memories of this time in your life. And it makes me glad that these days it’s so easy to take photos to capture history. I do worry just a bit that many of our photos never actually get printed. Again, I don’t know what the future will be like, but I’m pretty sure my MacBook Pro won’t be around in 2090. So I want to make sure that you all are doing something to get hard copies of your photos. Not all of them, but at least the important ones. Print them out at home. Get them printed at Costco. For the really great ones – use a good lab. Or even make books of photos from holidays, vacations, or special events.

As time goes by, memories fade and stories may cease to be told, but our photographs will live on. So keep shooting and keep printing. And keep preserving those memories for generations to come.



See the slideshow here: