Arriving at the reception

One of the pressures on a wedding photographer during the wedding day, unrelated to the actual photography, is being able to always stay one step ahead of the bride and groom.   If photographs are being taken in the bride’s house in the morning, that pressure first manifests itself when it is time to leave for the ceremony, with the photographer needing to get there first to prepare for her arrival.  Later in the day another such time is going from the ceremony to the reception, when again it is preferable to be ready to photograph the bride and groom as they arrive at the venue.

Last Friday for Elaine and Derek’s wedding the journey from the ceremony to the reception was barely a mile, but it was also the last Friday before Christmas, and the route ran along the Grand Canal – notoriously busy at the best of times – and so I knew it could be tight to get to the Burlington, park and be ready for Elaine and Derek’s arrival.   A bit of pre-planning was therefore required.

I visited the Burlington before the ceremony to find out in what part of the bar the drinks reception was being held, and to suss out possible locations for a group shot if the weather wasn’t going to allow me to do that outside the ceremony.  As I left I saw an attendant wandering around the car park and so informed him that I would be back at about 3.45 with a wedding party and asked if he would reserve a space for me near the door of the hotel – he duly obliged, and when I was to later arrive a few cars ahead of the wedding car from the registry office, I was able to simply move a cone to one side, swing into the space nearest the door, and before the wedding car had pulled up I was already photographing it.

I lead the way for Derek and Elaine to walk into the drinks reception where their guests were already assembled, and with my flash in TTL mode, and the camera on aperture priority, captured a sequence of shots of their arrival.  My ISO was at 400 to help the flash a little and keep recycling times low, and the aperture was wide for the same reason, and to keep the background soft.  I should have adjusted the shutter speed from the 1/30s I had it at during the latter part of the ceremony because there was much more movement in this shot than in any of the ceremony shots, and there’s a little ghosting going on, especially on Derek.

Still, I think the shot captures that moment in the day nicely, as it captures the movement, which is what I was after.

The framing is deliberate to give Elaine and Derek space to walk into in the picture, with them coming from right to left, and I enforced this framing before I ever took the shot by placing my focus point at the right of the frame.  Focus mode here is continuous, with the D300 able to track a moving subject that way, and I had a slight pan of the camera to keep them in the same point of the frame, and to emphasize the movement with a little blurring that the panning would introduce.