A month or so back, a friend of mine had asked me to take some photos of her family… I’ve done family photos before, but usually it’s with parents who have young kids (I’m at that age where my friends are starting to have kids).  So this was a nice departure, where it’s easy to get the subjects to actually look towards the camera… (then again, you don’t get the cute candid moments where the kid is definitely doing something he’s not supposed to be doing :))

The photos were done early evening, slightly before the golden hour, so the light still wasn’t great, and so I decided to use off camera flash.  Sometimes I get a little too tunnel vision on doing things a certain way, I miss some other shots.  I think I could have balanced the flash with the ambient a little better, or gone with some shots with just available light for a more natural look.  Luckily, Greta and her brother and mom were great sports about it, and we had a great time.  And they liked the pics too.  So that’s good.  Also, thanks to my buddy Rob for hucking my gear around and being my Voice Activated Lightstand.  I treated him to a delicious vietnamese meal for his hard work.

So, I originally started this blog to talk about photography, and stuff I’ve learned, but then I started writing about my trip to South Africa (which I never finished writing about), and then I kind of dropped the ball on what I’ve been up to lately… So, I’m going to get back to the heart of the blog, and talk photography…

So, I recently went out to NYC for my friend Allen & Julie’s wedding.  They had a really sweet photographer already, so it was awesome to watch him in action.  The dude had an assistant holding a light stick, with a continuous LED light, as well as a couple of strobes which looked like they were being triggered by radio poppers.  In addition to those, he had a couple of strobes on light stands in the corners of the room.  I did my best to stay out of the way of the professional photographer, and only took photos for myself.  I took advantage of the continuous light the assistant was carrying around and grabbed a couple of shots without flash, from where I was sitting…

So, I took a bunch less than what I have taken in the past, but at the same time, I got a few that I really liked.  I used my 35mm f/1.4 to get these shots in low light (at iso 800, with the shutter speed around 1/60th of a second, which was enough to reduce motion blur and camera shake, but still get enough light without having to go past iso 800, which can get a little noisy on the Olympus E620).  And since I took less, I didn’t have to process as many, and that’s nice.  The wedding was super nice, and really fun… Open bar, tons of dancing, and the best wedding date ever.  There was a time when I spent too much time taking pictures, and not enough partying… this time, I think I struck a good balance.

They had their wedding in Long Island City at the Water’s Edge, which offered an awesome view of the city… I took this handheld with my wide-angle zoom at 12mm (24mm EFL), iso 800, and 1/3s.  It was a really sweet view, which was made even more awesome with the misty fogginess which followed the rain earlier that evening.

And here are a few more photos from throughout the night… 🙂