Monday, and its bucketing down in Joburg. The kind of rain that last week drowned the mamba, she’s still in the shop and I’m heading towards Shepstone Gardens for Tova and Brad’s chuppah. I had been kind of mournfully looking at the rain out of the bedroom window this morning, swearing softly under my breath and muttering something about sunny South Africa, when V pointed out that at this point I probably wouldn’t know what to do if it didn’t rain on a day I had to shoot a wedding.

Shepstone Gardens is rapidly becoming the IT venue if you’re going to have a wedding on that end of the world, and they seem to be building more and more cool nooks and crannies every time we shoot there. Beautiful venue and a stunning, stunning wedding – I would have actually liked to have posted some images of the actual chuppah and bedekken, cause from a photojourn perspective there is so much emotion, but I feel that they are private moments and best left for those who were there. We did the photoshoot in twilight, I’m not even sure that the sun made it out of those clouds except for one glorious moment during the chuppah. Did I mention that Tova, Brad and guests raised the roof at Shepstone? You haven’t lived until you get stuck inside a hora at a Jewish wedding wondering whether to breath in or breath out or take photos.

Just thought I’d add that we got a lot of help from DVI who were the videographers at the wedding and are highly recommended.

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Just editing Kerry’s wedding and came across some crackers that I wanted to add to the blog before it turns into 2009. More soon.

I was bad. I snuck in a couple of weddings at the end of the year, after I had told V that we were going to shut down. I had good reasons though. I mean how are you supposed to say no to someone you’ve known for ages, had braais with at my brother’s house, someone who phones every couple of weeks and says .. Hi, I’m in (insert exotic place like Uganda, New Orleans etc) so I haven’t had time to send through the contract … it was a bit odd photographing someone we’ve known from before we were shooting weddings. Kind of brought home the whole point of doing photojourn and not acting like the ringmaster.

Ingrid and Frank booked one of our new no reception packages, more about those at some point and Ingrid look stunning in her dress, and the whole thing felt natural and relaxed. Of course it bucketed down as soon as I tried to set up the formal group photos, which turned the bit of veld I had planned to use for the couples photos into a muddy patch of land – welcome to sunny SA – I love rain though, the quality of the light is amazing, you get incredibly colored skies and it usually either stops or just drizzles which leaves you with with a chance to create some unique images.

Taken this Saturday, inner city Joburg, where Nuno and Renata (and guests) raised the roof at the Rand Club.

Our last official wedding of the season, thank you all for your support this year and for taking the time to clock almost half a million visits to the website, we’ll see you all in Jan with some serious updates and loads more from this killer bean wedding.

Two more days until the studio closes and we’re slowly catching up with the blog posts. A couple of weekends ago, I had the pleasure of photographing Brooke and LJ’s wedding at Oakfield Farm. LJ is the infamous LJ Urbani of Urbani Photography in the UK, which meant that we were once again photographing the wedding of a wedding photographer. I may have been a tad nervous.

They tied the knot at the always great Oakfield, where I actually shot my first wedding, and incidentally the wedding of the year last year. It’s always a challenge to make a place that has been shot a million times look fresh and new and unique to the couple. I have difficulty with those venues where the photographer gets dragged from one setup scene that gets photographed week after week to another. So step 1, take a walk outside the electrified fence and find a nice area that doesn’t get photographed, do the majority of the shoot there. Step 2, take a walk to the stables and try to forget all the photographs you have seen that were taken there and do something new – very easy actually when you have clients that trust you and respect your style. Thank you both, for good humor, funny faces, cracking me up all afternoon and being the least stressed couple we’ve ever photographed – and that’s saying quite a bit, our clients are always really calm (or at least they look that way from behind the big black camera).

I’ve been playing around with black and white conversions recently, trying some things and cooking up some of my own black and white actions for photoshop. Brooke and LJ had a timeless quality to them, very silver screen in the Holywood glamor days, so I decided to go with creamy black and whites for some of their couple shots and painterly feel to some of the color portraits. The bit of the mumbling mafia boss still makes me laugh … he says (to be said in Don Vito Corleone voice) …

I wanted to add a bit about blowing out the whites, which is very easy to do in digital photography, and seeing so many wedding pics where there is no detail on the bride’s dress but I’ll save that little diatribe for another post.

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Ok, so I’ve been trying to catch up on weddings before we close down for the year, which is why we’ve only been having a couple of images per wedding. A couple of weekends ago, Kim and I went up to Bela Bela (I love saying Bela Bela, try it in a deep Elvis voice) to photograph Bern and Guy at the Shangri-La hotel. A place which evokes a million memories of going on holidays in the 80′s with my parents. My dad would have loved that place, or maybe he would have hated it, but we definitely would have stopped over on the way to somewhere us kids definitely didn’t want to go to.

The burnt out forest where we did our portrait shoot had a very fairy tale quality to it. I loved it, and Bern and Guy insisted that we wait for the sun to hit that crucial golden hour before we finished the shoot. My kind of couple. So we waited just on the side of the forest, the grass was an amazing green color on the other side of the fence, the sun hit it just right and suddenly we were looking at a postcard. Sometimes the moment is just too perfect you know, too saccharine, like the cover of a chocolate box, or a hallmark greeting, you need to find something to add a bit of an edge. Like a bunch of blackjacks or thorns, or a worn out building. Our edge was a bit of rusted barbed wire fence, which for me, lifted the photo out of the kitsch category and into something I’m happy to show on the blog.

Anyway, Bern, Guy, thanks for treating us like old friends, traipsing through a black, burnt out forest, avoiding beetles the size of my fist, and not looking at me like I fell on my head as a child when I insisted that the moment was too perfect. Beautiful wedding, an amazing bunch of friends and family, killer images – pretty much what you’d expect from a couple living in a place called Christchurch.

Just a quick reminder that we will be closing for our annual Dec leave as of Friday

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Grand weekend! A road trip, totally rockstar couple and a burnt out forest.

btw Kabluey … big thumbs especially if you’re into flicks about alienation and mascots, I laughed till tears came out my eyes. Stunning images, especially as he crosses the fields and from inside the head. The Happening on the other hand … boring as beans, badly shot, cheesy overdone concept, and all of this from the master of the dark and lovely, M. Night himself. We expected better, and we’ve waited a long time since Lady in the Water.