Tracee and DJ Get Married at Broken Top

A fun wedding at Broken Top in Bend, Oregon

Tracee and DJ threw a fun wedding for their fun families and friends at Broken Top in Bend, Oregon on a warm and beautiful August afternoon. The guy I used to shoot weddings with, Todd Martin-Jones, was the other wedding photographer with me. I loved working with Tracee because she really wasn’t afraid to show her happiness. A camera can’t create emotion. So when a bride shows it constantly my job as a wedding photographer becomes infinitely easier. When I start making nice pictures, the day transforms into photography magic.

Their wedding was one of the first for me using the Profoto light off camera at the reception. Doing this style of lighting eventually led to me leaving the regular hotshoe* flashes at home and going commando with the Profoto only. It pays to experiment with lighting.

I was really happy with the pictures we made. Nice venue, great couple, warm beautiful day - everything clicked.

• A hotshoe flash plugs into the tops of higher end cameras. The top sections of modern hotshoe flashes can bend to different angles to bounce the light, or stay at a 90 degree angle and point straight at the subject. In the newspaper world we called that a nuclear flash because of the harshness of direct flash. Using the hotshoe to bounce light from a ceiling or wall really makes for a lot of same-looking boring pictures. The bouncing techniques work really well in the newspaper photography world but I feel it doesn’t work for weddings. Newspaper work usually only has one picture for a story whereas wedding photography shows a couple hundred pictures from one event. If the light looks the same in every picture, the end result looks really boring to me. The Profoto lights are mounted on a light stand and used exclusively off camera for an infinite number of different looks.