Rosie & Ruairí (Part 2)

At the end of the last post I was mentioned my game of Russian roulette with the weather.  It involved me looking quite a bit at the rainfall radar on my iPhone, trying to predict when the current shower would stop or the next one would start, and it involved the weather doing its best to outsmart me.  I like to think, therefore, that a 1-1 draw was a fair result.  I scored first, so to speak, when a clearance allowed me bring the bridal party for a short stroll along the avenue leading to the house.  We needed two attempts to get the shot I had in mind.  Turns out the avenue to the house isn’t wide enough for 8 people to walk alongside each other linking arms.  Regrouping closer to the house, on a wider part of the driveway, I gave the bridal party just one little bit of direction – walk at a normal pace, and chat amongst yourselves.  I’m not crazy about directing photographs in this way, but some of the formals, especially when you have 8 people in them, are better with a tiny bit of guidance.  Keeping it to that advice – have a chat – means the laughter isn’t posed – it’s what naturally happens when 8 people are put on the spot and prompted to chat while walking arm in arm.  And, conveniently, that’s the shot I was after.  Sadly, not long after getting it, the weather caught me off guard midway through the family photos that we went straight into, and one half of the family were photographed under wedding umbrellas, while the other half were photographed under the cover of the marquee.  Speaking of umbrellas…

… I spotted these later in the afternoon once all the guests had retired to the marquee for dinner.  Thought it was kind of a nice way of summing up the weather at least:

Before the bridal party shot, having walked down the avenue, the overhanging trees, soft light, and smiling bride and groom resulted in these:

The marquee was a sight to behold, as you can imagine of a tent that needs to sit a couple of hundred people comfortably for dinner.  And while technically a tent, it neither felt like nor looked like one:

Just before dinner, as Rosie and Ruairí waited for the last of the guests to take their seats so they could be announced into the room as husband and wife, I spotted Pat, Ruairí’s father, going through his speech one last time.

The speeches themselves were up their with the best of them, with genuine emotion and genuine wit in equal measures, and they had the room in tears and in laughter, as all good wedding speeches should.  I won’t tell you what Fin, Rosie’s father, said to prompt this reaction:

A bit of a trademark shot for me – it’s great when you can let someone else do the work:

After the speeches, and before the band started playing, there was a surprise for guests (and for me), as Rosie and Ruairí called everyone out into the garden to launch the Chinese lanterns that they had left at every table.   Before they could go up there was a necessary call to be made to the coast guard.  I couldn’t help wondering who was going to call the fire brigade when one landed on the marquee. In fact it’s probably a good job it had rained so much that day or the couple that got stuck in the trees bordering the garden might have caused a few problems had the trees not been so wet. Still, they all got off safely in the end!

For the photographers out there, let me take a moment on the lighting of the next two shots.  Having realised what was happening, I scrambled to figure out how to photograph it, and instantly knew these would be the most technically-challenging shots of the day.  Flash wasn’t really going to be much help to me – at least not for the lanterns and the general environment around me, so I went to a high ISO (3200), fast aperture (f/2.8), and aperture-priority mode to allow the camera handle shutter speed.  Not having much faith in what the result would look like, to say I got a confidence boost when I saw this next shot – my first test shot – would be an understatement:

I was certainly happy to live with that look, and that first test shot turned out to be the best of those of Rosie and Ruairí launching their lantern.  The backlight here is coming from a floodlight set up nearby to illuminate a section of the garden nearest the marquee.  The shutter speed ended up at 1/15th of a second here, so I manually dialled that in for the rest of the shots, to keep consistency.

Once a number of the lanterns were airborne I crouched low and caught Rosie and Ruairí’s attention for a couple of seconds.  I took a burst of five shots, four of which were perfectly acceptable.  For the fifth I happened to piggyback onto someone else’s flash, and they happened to be standing off to camera right, just where I would have put an off-camera flash had I had time.

Here’s that fifth shot:

You might think this was a lucky break – yes, to some extent it was – but I did aim for it, having had success with this approach once or twice in the past.  So I’m still taking credit for it!

I was back at the marquee on the Saturday as a guest for a “day-after-the-night-before” barbeque and, having had a quiet house at home that morning, and having been eager to look through the photos myself, actually had the slideshow all finished by the time I got there.  Before I had headed there Emma, Ruairí’s sister, had told me that they had a projector at the marquee in the hope of showing the rugby later on that evening, so I brought the laptop and the slideshow with me just in case. We ended up projecting it onto the wall inside the marquee for the 100 or so guests at the barbeque, with everyone seated in a semicircle, and all eyes on the screen.  We were waiting for Rosie’s dad to join us and, taking note of the large group assembled to watch the slideshow with Rosie and Ruairí, I only half-jokingly commented to Emma that I hoped it was as good as I thought it was.   Judging from the reactions during and afterwards, I think it was.  And the shot above – the one that proved the most difficult to get – turned out to be the perfect closing shot for the slideshow, while the chorus of “Wow” that greeted it when it went up on screen was a nice bonus, and reminded me why I love photographing weddings.