Photographing My Niece's Wedding

This weekend, I had the pleasure of photographing my niece's wedding. As we drove to Sacramento, CA, we encountered some pretty heavy rain and I wondered about the weather conditions for the big day. Well...we woke up to bright sunny skies, which pleased everyone in the wedding party, everybody except me since this is not my preferred shooting conditions, but what can you do? Since I had not photographed at this location before, I got to the location early to find some good shooting spots. They had a morning wedding which meant that we would be shooting their pictures at high noon. Yikes! Bright sun, very little shade, no clouds to come to the rescue, and they had a couple of spots where they really wanted images taken (that were not ideal at this time of day.) Time for me to sweat a little!

Caitlin and her new husband looked great, which made my life just that much easier.

We started taking pictures from one of their favorite locations out in front of the Temple. I knew that this was going to be a challenge. Luckily I had brought along my Photoflex diffuser with me and my brother-in-law made for a great lighting assistant. For this shot, I had a diffuser over Caitlin (to shade her) and had my wife hold her veil out to side.

I did find a couple of spots with some shade, and this is one of my favorites. I used the California Sunbounce to put some warm light on them and used a little fill flash to separate them from the background.

The wedding party with my daughter, Ali at the far left. :)

Some people are going to look at this shot and think that I hired a model for this wedding pose, but nope, Caitlin just looked like a model!

Toward the end of the two and a half hours of shooting, I was playing around with Caitlin and asked her to hold her bouquet up to her face. I just love her eyes and thought that this would make for a cool shot. I took one look at the screen on the back of the camera and knew that this would be a keeper.

Caitlin and Adam have their first dance.

And my brother-in-law, James, looks like a proud father during their father/daughter dance.

Congratulations Caitlin and Adam!