Brooke and LJ at Oakfield Farm
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) …
at the stables, that was one serious dress, look at that smile on LJ’s face!
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.
