A Moment on the Dance Floor
The Rare Fun Garter Belt Toss
At many weddings the garter belt toss can be anticlimactic. All the single men just stand in a circle staring at it all lonely on the floor. I’m a big fan of the “Wedding Crashers” movie. The two characters really bring life to every wedding they crash. I love high energy weddings where everyone’s having the time of their lives. For me there’s two movies every guest should watch: this one and “The Hangover.”
Honestly, have fun! Life’s too short to be a wallflower.
A few of the Wedding Crasher rules from the movie.
Be Enthusiastic
Look at those rules. They work really well for weddings and for life in general. Every rule in there works really well for being a wedding guest. I’ve actually looked up sites that have all 200-something rules and they’re amazing. If you read my last post about going to Las Vegas for our birthdays, you see quite clearly how I live these rules in my own life.
As a matter of fact, about two weeks before meeting my wife, Mary, I thought long and hard about all my ex-girlfriends and others I’ve gone out with before meeting her and came up with my own Ten Rules For Dating. My rules were directly based on the Wedding Crasher rules. We met, had a kid, got married, and have been married ever since. So I speak from personal experience about how coming up with rules for living really works.
So about this picture. Let me share it again because this blog crops the lead picture for some reason. I don’t like seeing pictures shot in full frame cropped. At the SF State photojournalism school we had to show the un-cropped pictures for review every week. That training was tough, but it made me a better photographer.
Split Second Moments are the Best!
Look at these guys. All of them living by rules 6, 7, 8, 66, and 75. I loved seeing this happen. So much life energy spilling out all over the dance square that night. It doesn’t get any better from my point of view. Let me steal a line from another movie “Top Gun” in saying evenings like these are a “target rich environment.” My creativity feeds off this kind of energy.
Some readers out there might be wondering how I got this picture. I love sharing technical information about photography. Here’s a schematic of the shot. I was standing just off the portable outdoor dance square with the groom just to my left. You can see his arm blurry in the left side of the picture. I had set up my trusty Profoto light in the corner with the giant translucent umbrella that works so well for these types of scenes. It sprays light all over the place. As long as I’m doing pictures in the arc of light it’s creating I’m good. Therefore I had to ask the groom to toss the garter into the light arc while standing in my shadow from the light. It was quite dark and my worry as always, with every camera brand, is to get the focus right. I shot this with the Nikon 35mm f1.4 lens and there was never a guarantee it would be in focus. So to be honest, a great deal of luck was involved with making this picture. I just made sure that middle guy was in focus before shooting and hoped he would stay in focus while moving.. Plus I got lucky in focusing on the right guy. Finally I got really lucky with the emotion they all showed me. That, to me, is what makes this picture. This moment lasted maybe a tenth of a second and was gone forever.
Sidebar:
“The Hangover” remains the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. Every joke builds from every previous joke. Plus it’s great slapstick. It’s one of my go-to movies after a long drive or flight because I can laugh without thinking.
My all-time most favorite movie is “Pride and Prejudice” from 2004. Shocking, right? Last weekend I made my wife go with me to see it on re-release. I was the only male in the audience. Turning off the color and watching it in black and white makes for a different yet wonderful experience. Except for the last scene in the bog with the blues and golds. I’ve been trying to figure out how the photographer made her face glow so perfectly at the last moment in the bog when she’s looking at Mr. Darcy. I turn the color back on for the bog scene because the colors need to be felt and understood for their meaning to sink in.
