Saturday may have been off, but Sunday we were back in town for a couples session. The city is quiet on a Sunday, a few ZCC members in their blue and white suits hurrying home, a couple holding hands and running across the Nelson Mandela bridge, taxis hooting, a million pigeons snacking on crumbs left by street vendors, and that distinctive feeling that the weekend is over.

We got some killer bee light though, and Jo’burg on a Sunday afternoon is a completely different beast from Jo’burg on any other day. All majestic and silent. My favorite time to walk down Bree Street. I love the authenticity of the buildings and the history of the place. Jarrett and Cornel were up for anything, our kind of clients, so we got to go to our regular scenic spots as well as a couple that I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Nice

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I’ve been hanging on to this couple session for a while, one of our favourite shoots of the year, old planes, extinct films, rockstar couple. Shot at the war museum in case you’re planning something similar and themed after the end scene in Casablanca and the original movie poster. I was tempted with some crunchy black and white, but decided that a bit of color would give it a nice twist, and make it look more like a movie poster.

Anyway, took me a while to settle on a single image, but this one may be my favourite.

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Just finished editing Deborah and Michele’s couples session. For me this image is made by the guy on the bicycle, he gives the image a sense of place and second focal point.

Since they said that they weren’t planning on taking the dress back to Australia anyway …

Almost unbelievably, seven visits to the dentist in three months and my teeth are still sore. I’m still chewing codeine by the handful, its either that or gnawing off my arm. Hopefully, today’s visit will be the last for while. Toothache is very distracting when you’re trying to decide what shade of grey a red dress should be in black and white.

Its been an incredibly busy two weeks at the studio. We’ve been in and out of town on at least four shoots, I’ve been underwater photographing a red dress, more teeth have been pulled out, photographed a rocking bridal on a horse, our promo video was shot, edited and the first draft was delivered. We released a new set of vintage actions on the Dror Eyal Experiment and tried to edit a serious amount of cool weddings. Very little sleep has been had by all and no work has been done on the thesis.

But before I crash for the night, a quick couple of pics from our most rocking couple Leasha and Cameron. An urban, grungy, and just loads of fun, couples session. It was impossible to get these two to look serious for a second.

Its hard to strike a balance with blog posts. On the one hand I want to showcase a lot of our photojourn documentary style photography, because that’s what we specialise in – capturing real moments as they happen. On the other hand I feel that we shoot killer bee portraits and I want to show a lot of those. Then there is the issue that I don’t want to post 50 images from a wedding. I want to show our best four or five from the day so that the client gets a nice representation and can send the link to friends who weren’t able to make it, but I also want to give prospective clients a glimpse of the kind of images we shoot week after week. Its hard looking at over 4000 images and trying to pick four that I feel represent the wedding for me.

Last Wednesday Deborah and Michele got married at the Johannesburg Country Club. Besides being total rockstars, totally themselves, laughing, having a good time and just making it super easy for us to get killer bee documentary images they were also very very photogenic. Too easy. Deborah also realised that we weren’t going to have enough time for her portrait shoot so she booked a day after shoot, which meant that we got to do another portrait shoot at a different location. I’d originally thought maybe something grungy downtown to offset the JCC image, but after seeing that dress and Michele’s suit, I knew that it had to be something classic and elegant.

The highveld thunderstorm season has started in full force, one of the few reasons to still be living in Jozi.

deborah and michele, 

We had one of our coolest couple sessions today, started off at Melrose Arch and ended up at … well, its my new top secret location. Lets just call it Carlo’s place. We got to play with some low light situations, laughed way too much and I even managed to sneak in some caffeine. The weekend is officially over.

PS: Had lunch yesterday with V at this place near Melrose Arch where someone clearly had a very dark sense of humour. They’d named one of the wraps, Mary’s Little Lamb and one of the breakfasts (with two eggs) was known as the Broken Nest. Mary’s Lamb was delicious btw.

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