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.

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.