Kelly and John's wedding at the Edgewater Lodge

Kerry and John came out from London with their two young children to get married at the Edgewater Lodge in Whistler, a favourite location of mine. It was a really small wedding, but they were such nice people that it made up for it.






Kelly and her mother getting ready




There's a terrific wooden fence at the Edgewater that makes for a great backdrop

First Wedding of the Season

This is the first wedding of my 2010 summer season. Actually, it's the first one I've done since January, which is a break courtesy of the Olympic Games, which shut everything in town down for the entire winter. These guys were a lot of fun to work with, and really made for great photos.







Tech Stuff:
It was an overcast day with some light rain, which made for nice soft light, and not much need for any flash. The Edgewater Lodge is a great place to photograph a wedding, because it gives you a real range of locations and backgrounds, all within a short walk of the main lodge.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: AF-S Nikon 28-70 and AF-S Nikon 70-200
Lighting: Natural

Trite, but True

This is a shot I see a lot of, the couple driving off into the sunset in a convertible. The problem is, being in a resort, doing mostly destination weddings, most of my clients don't have cars as part of their wedding. Luckily for Paula and Adam, one of the guests had rented a convertible Mustang at the airport, which we appropriated for the photos.

To get the shot, I sat on the folded up canvas roof of the car. I had one toe hooked under the armrest of the right rear seat to keep from rolling off the back of the car. The fisheye is so wide that I was having a hard time keeping my body out of the picture. You can see my toe behind Paula's seat.

Tech Stuff:

I stopped the lens way down and used a really slow shutter speed to blur the scenery. I used a fisheye lens to accentuate the blurring of the scenery.

Camera: Nikon D2x

Lens: Nikon 10.5 mm DX, f/2.8

Bless this Mess

When I shoot the 'getting ready' part of the wedding day, I always call ahead to make sure it's okay to come to the room. The answer I almost always get is, "sure, but let me clean the place up before you get here". I tell them for this part of the day, the messier the better, as it makes for great photos.

Tech Stuff:

When a subject is heavily back lit, there's two ways to deal with it, balancing the exposure with flash, which tends to flatten out the image, or expose for the subject and hope for the best. The latter makes for interesting photos, but you never really know what you're going to get.

Camera: Nikon D700 (both)

Lens: 17-35 mm AF-S f/2,8 (top), 28-70 mm AF-S f/2.8 (bottom)

Embrace the Weather

One of the truisms of working in Whistler is that often you're not dealing with the best of weather conditions. The top photo was probably the hottest day of the year, while the bottom photo had to be the coldest and wettest of the summer season. I like to emphasize the weather in my shots, as it's a big part of day (it was raining and really cold when I got married).

In the top shot, the guys had picked up a box of the worst sun glasses I'd ever seen at some dollar store. The lenses were like polished mirrors, and I thought that they might make a cool looking photo.

The lower shot was totally the opposite. It had been raining hard all day, and the temperature was nearly freezing. We had been running from one covered location for photos to another all day. I don't know where the umbrella came from, but the flash of red against the green background really made things pop. The couple was literally running from the photo location to the lodge for dinner, and I was able to grab one frame that worked from the sequence. Since I was out in the open to get the correct angle, I was completely soaked by the time I made it back to the lodge.

Tech Stuff:

Both shots are fairly simple, with no extra lighting added, and really not a lot of planning either.

I used my fisheye for the distorting effect on the top photo, and asked all the guys to look straight into the sun. I was at a right angle to the low afternoon sun, which gives the guys a real chiseled, macho look. The glasses were so crappy that they could only look into the sun for a few seconds at a time.

The lower shot was done with my old Nikon D2x camera at ISO 800, which is right at the end of the line of how far you can push the camera sensitivity (with the D700 I'm using now, it can shoot nearly perfectly at ISO 1600). Even then, the shutter speed was still about 1/60th of a second, with the lens wide open at f/2.8. The 70-200 telephoto zoom has an image stabilizing feature that I hardly ever use, as it costs you some image quality. However, at the time I figured there was no way I was going to get anything without the stabilizing, so I flipped it on. The shutter speed was so slow that the rain in the photo has turned into long streaks.

Camera: Nikon D2x (both shots)

Lens: 10.5 mm DX, f/2.8 fisheye (top), 70-200 mm AF-S f/2.8 (lower)

Two Light Portrait

While I prefer to keep things as simple as possible, sometimes the elements (like a hot looking red Ford Mustang) call for slick multi-light shot.

Tech Stuff:

The main light was a Nikon SB-900 on a stand to the couple's left. The sun was directly behind them, so other than some rim lighting, without the flash, they would be completely dark. The initial shots looked good, but the front of the car was still in shadow. I gave my spare flash to the best man, and asked him to aim it directly at the Mustang emblem on the front grill of the car.

I use the SU-800 infrared controller to fire the flashes. While you can use with the iTTL system, I usually just set the flashes manually from the controller, using the rear LCD screen to adjust the lighting levels. Being able to adjust the flashes from the camera is a real pleasure, and saves a lot of putzing around with the separate flash units.

Camera: Nikon D700

Lens: Nikon 17-35mm AF-S f/2.8

Light: Nikon SB-900 (camera right), Nikon SB-800 (camera left), Nikon SU-800 controller.

A New Location

Cindy and Duncan's wedding was at one of my favourite locations, the Edgewater Lodge in Whistler. The wedding was originally scheduled to be on the main lawn in front of the main lodge, but since there was a marquis tent set up on it for a large event the next day, a new location had to be found for the ceremony. This is just to side in an area that I often use for portraits, but as far as I know, has never been used for ceremonies. It just goes to show that fresh eyes can can show you new thing, as nobody at the Edgewater had thought of doing ceremonies in this spot. I think it looks really nice.

Tech Stuff:

Camera: Nikon D700

Lens: 17-35mm AF-S, f/2.8

Edgewater Lodge Wedding - A quick peek

Cindy peeks out from the Edgewater Lodge's back garage, where she'd been hiding out before her wedding.

Tech Stuff:

While I'm really liking the full frame D700, I also still carry my old Nikon D2x, which has a lens conversion factor of 1.5x, i.e., your 200mm gives you the same throw as a 300mm on a full frame camera. This was a totally unexpected moment, and without the extra magnification that the D2x gave me, it would have been way to loose too do anything with.

Camera: Nikon D2x

Lens: 70-200mm AF-S, f/2.8