Peak2Peak Wedding, Josh and Paul

Josh and Paul came out to Whistler for their wedding on the Peak2Peak gondola from Australia. Paul had a large group of friends from Dublin Ireland, and Josh's mother came out from Australia.


The wedding inside the Peak2Peak gondola at Whistler. There aren't a lot of places you really need a fisheye lens, but this is one of them.


Paul and his Irish friends serenade Josh as the gondola comes into the Blackcomb station.


Heavy snow on the way to Champaign at Christine's at Blackcomb.




We finished up the wedding at the Nita Lake Lodge. It's a nice spot, and I always like to do some non-alpine shots with these weddings.

Tech Stuff
A big part of planning for a wedding is knowing the equipment you'll need for a certain job. Often I'll pack specialized gear, like the fisheye lens I used in the gondola car, if I know I'll be in a tricky situation.

Cameras: Nikon D2x, Nikon D700
Lens: Nikon 10.5mm DX, AF-S Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8, AF-S Nikon 28-70 f/2.8
Lighting: Nikon SB-800 bounced into a photo umbrella (last photo). Controlled by the SU-800.

Whistler Helicopter Wedding

Ashley and Duncan are from the UK, and came out to Whistler for an extended vacation, and thought they would get married while they were out here. To make it really special, they decided to get Blackcomb Aviation fly them up to Beverly Lake on the back side of Rainbow Mountain for a high altitude wedding.

Here's a link to the wedding album I designed for them.

I don't to photograph in a lot of cathedrals, but this is way better.


Ashley gets a new hairdo as the helicopter takes off.


I love doing black and white landscapes, and it was a beautiful day for it.


Dale the mountain guide leads the parents over from the helicopter. It made for quite the entry.




Ashley and Duncan get a lashing as the helicopter lands to collect us.


While I love being in the high alpine for weddings, if there's a lot of snow, it's sometimes tough to get a good portrait, so we stopped off at Green Lake for a quick portrait session.


I put this little animation together of the helicopter taking off and landing. I thought it looked pretty cool.

Tech Stuff
A helicopter wedding is tough thing to co-ordinate, especially in the winter. Before Ashley and Duncan arrived, I had a long talk with Dale, the mountain guide, to make sure we were in a safe area, and to see if he had any off limits areas to keep out of. Avalanches and steep slopes are a real hazards in the back country. Helicopters, especially when they're running, are very dangerous to be moving around, so you want to have someone there who really knows their stuff.

I packed all my gear in a backpack, as the rotor blast from the helicopter blows snow into pretty much every crevice imaginable, and you want to have as much as possible packed away.

Rainbow Park in Winter

Sharon and Ed came to Whistler from Washington state for small low key wedding with their close friends and family. Sharon made an advance trip out in February and toured every outdoor wedding location in Whistler I could think of before finally settling on Rainbow Park, on the west side of Alta Lake, and about as far removed from things in Whistler as you can get. I love Rainbow in the winter. There's almost nobody there, and the views can't be beat.


The Bridge of Sighs over the River of Golden Dreams and no, I'm not making up those names).


With family in from Florida and Texas, I had to get a group shot with everyone on the frozen lake.

Tech Stuff
Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8

Nicklaus North Winter Wedding

Trina and Mark came to Whistler from Washington State to have a intimate wedding at a Nicklaus North Chalet. If Trina looks a little cold in the outside pictures, it was -11 degrees outside when we did the portrait session.







Tech Stuff:
The pictures are a little misleading, as we shot the portraits the morning after the wedding. The ceremony was 8:00 in the evening, and there was no natural light at all for portraits. For the pictures of the ceremony, I turned the camera flash off and turned up the camera ISO up to 3200 for a few photos. It was so dark that the guy doing the ceremony couldn't read the vows, so he grabbed one of the candles for light, and that made the photo. For the group photo, I brought an alien Bee strobe unit with a softbox mounted on it. My camera flash just didn't have the juice to do a photo like this.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8 (ceremony) , Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8 (portraits)
Lighting: Alien Bee B1600 Studio Strobe, Medium six softbox.