Black Butte Wedding Photography
A Big Weekend for My Wedding Photography
Once upon a time I had a uniquely special weekend of wedding photography. On Saturday I shot Bailey and Joe’s Cowboy Wedding way out there someplace between Prineville and Madras. I stayed up until about 1AM doing late night pictures and then driving home to Bend. After plugging in all the batteries I slept like a log. The next morning I woke up, ate, got dressed, and drove out past Sisters to Black Butte Ranch for Stephanie and Brian’s wedding. The guy I used to shoot weddings with, Todd Martyn-Jones had signed up the wedding and so I never met Stephanie or Brian before their wedding.
One of the skills a person learns from being a newspaper photographer: how to make quick friends while working. Just good enough friends to make nice pictures. Not just nice pictures, the best pictures ever of the couple. Pictures they’ll treasure forever and pass down to their descendants. I want those unborn people in the future to not only know what a couple looked like when they got married, but what it felt like to be there with them.
And so, once upon a time I had the best weekend I’ve ever had while working as a wedding photographer. Every idea I tried worked. At Stephanie and Brian’s wedding I put the flash outside a window with a big sheet covering the window to light the room where Stephanie and her friends got ready. It worked. I was standing in just the right places to get Stephanie at the ceremony and then Brian at the cake cutting. At sunset I used the flash for some really nice portraits. But my favorite portrait (the one at top) I turned the flash off to see what the picture might look like. It worked too. The same as Bailey and Joe the day before.
Even though these weddings happened a long time ago now I haven’t been able to share them like this because of my less than spectacular ability with blogging and Instagram. Going through them and picking these pictures out let me relive a magical weekend with very special people.
I really like Stephanie and Brian and hope they’re living there happily ever after. One thing Stephanie told me, a thing I try to share with people, concerned the bouquet toss. She was a little older and had never been married. She said she really didn’t like the bouquet toss because it reminded everyone who was single and maybe a little sad about being single. Her saying that little thing really stuck in my mind and made me even happier that such great people had found each other. Of course I’m super happy to have been let into their lives for a day of being in the wedding photography zone.
