Robin & Rebecca's Wedding Photographs

We decided to shoot Robin and Rebecca’s  wedding photos at Bo-Kaap, a couple roads up from Long Street, Cape Town. It was freezing cold, windy, non-stop drizzling and very grey...Not appetising weather to shoot in but hey, What can you do??? Well, I tell you what you can do: Against anyones better judgement, have Robin and Rebecca consume a few swigs of Old Brown Sherrie, until their youth come to life, give them a Vespa kindly donated by a friend and simply let them loose!!!!
We started off by finding a very brightly painted yellow house and wall, which was excellent to brighten up the dull afternoon weather. Excellent for taking photos but honestly who the heck paints their house ultra bright yellow? I guess it always feels like summer in that house!..... I decided to use the cameras RAW setting function to allow for some post editing in Photoshop, which allows me to readjust the cameras white balance. This definitely always needs to be done in very dull weather and in very bright conditions to either lift the photo or deal with harsh white spots and shadows, especially on your persons face. I also decided to use my Canon 24-70mm L – lens set just off its wide angle range around 28mm. In my opinion this is the best lens I owe and would be very lost without it! It’s always my first choice when shooting weddings as its focus is super fast and quiet and always gives a good Depth of Focus, especially when used at f/2.8 aperture to allow the maximum light through.

By luck we also “found” a very random archway painted purple and brown, with some art work of the local labour back from Cape Town’s early days. We had moment to get out of the rain and shoot some in-motion photos for a few minutes but to our surprise we got stormed by a tour bus full of Germans and hence we decided THAT was our cue to get right out of there!!!! The last photo is of them making their great escape while still slightly under the influence of OBS!

Before leaving the area, we found one last hill which has some great cobble-stones and some seagulls, so we took our chances with me lying flat on the street and focusing in with my Canon 70-200mm L-lens shooting at around 1/80th of a second to try get as much light through the lens as possible. Thankfully it was Sunday so we never got interrupted by any town traffic, BUT we slowly noticed curtains getting pulled back from the surrounding flats with inquisitive faces looking back at us!!!! Probably thinking....”SHAME!!!”

Driving out of town we decided to shoot a few beach wedding pictures. The light was very dark so keeping my Canon camera on RAW; I turned the camera F settings up by 1¼ stops to be able to keep the photos pin sharp. Unfortunately this method means you almost always will over expose the background, which in this case was my sky. The below photos were taken around the 1/60th of a second, which means with any fast moving objects (In this case Rebecca’s roses!) will give a artistic motion type blur. Very nice when it works for you, but a pain when it goes wrong! During my early days I use to find it very difficult to judge this correctly. Sometimes you think it’s perfect while looking at the cameras 3 ½” LCD screen during a busy wedding shoot, just to get home and view them on your p.c. monitor......that’s when you feel the blood draining from your head!