Singaporean wedding in Gothenburg

NO! They are not Singaporeans living in Gothenburg! They came all the way to Sweden to get their wedding photos done!

Yes, it was hard to believe for me as well, not just in the beginning, but all the way till I actually met them here in Gothenburg. I am still fascinated by the fact they traveled across the world... And also that I was the one who got to work with them!

We had two great days of fun and intensive shooting marathon. Thanks both Wendy and Winson for sticking it out and not leaving me during one of the night shoots...

We went to quite a few different locations all around Gothenburg which probably allowed me to use all of the mobile gear I have. Off-camera flash, all lenses, filters, reflectors and diffusers- all of them were used at some point.

Here are some more of my favorite shots! Scroll down to the bottom to read some tech comments about the images.







Haha and yes- there were quite a few people interested in what on earth were we doing in the middle of the city, mid-day Friday in all of the wedding gear... :)


The hat store lady had even joined in for one of the shots :) Here I was standing quite far away shooting with 300mm lens, trying to frame the couple, when all of a sudden there were 3 people in my couple...


As promised earlier- some techie details.

I actually shot the wedding with a Nikon D5100.... OOoooops.... I can hear the gear geeks going nuts on me... But I have to say- my D70s is getting old... I never felt that way before about the camera, but now after running around with D5100 for two full days my good old D70s feels like an old tank... The decision has been made- D600 is very much waited for in my heart right now and I look forward to the rumors coming true!

The photo with the newlywed couple and city down below them in the background was taken in the mid-day sun. Lastolite tri grip difuser to the rescue! You can see bottom right on their hands the area that is not covered by the difuser (mine is a bit too small for two people...). Without the Lastolite they had two noses each... And with tri grip everything turned silky smooth! There was too little light on their faces with the difuser compared to the background that was lit by harsh sunlight, so a good thing to keep in mind is bouncing a flash off the difuser (or maybe shoot through it). I did not do that and thus suffered at the computer screen later.

Next two photos are just fun. Could not resist adding them here. But the location was perfect, so there was not much more than my standard Bibble workflow for these two.

Move on to the first night session we had at the bridge. And here is a great lesson about timing. It is all about waiting it out with night photography! First few photos we took there were UGLY! We were a bit closer to the bridge for the original location, but it was still too early in the day to get the truly juicy colors of the night into the photograph. I wanted to do some composites to save myself (we had to move on to the next location). Anyway, here is what it looked like after I had edited the living hell out of it:


Thinking I had lost this one, we decided to leave. Took a couple more close-up shots with the other side of the harbor as backdrop. Then, while walking away from the bridge, I turned around to take another look at it. And there it was- the perfect moment for taking this picture! Colors were saturated, the bridge lights were on and my couple was still not falling asleep! Less than 5 minutes later we were all happy with the outcome and there was no need for me to fake an HDR! The couple is lit with one bare Nikon SB-800 triggered via Elinchrom remote.

The photo on the stairs was made with one flash, same Nikon SB-800 also triggered with Elinchrom remote, but this time it went through Lastolite umbrella. This and the next photo were taken with the D70s. There was a really ugly reason for that- massive card failure on the D5100... Not sure what went wrong, but I though my heart would come out through my throat to say hi to me... This happened right before the very last session we had. I was back at my computer moving data from the card to backups. And then something went really wrong. I will write more on the lost file recovery on some other occasion, but to sum it up no images were lost; only I will live 10 years less after that event...

Eventually there were 1.5 thousand photos for them to choose from. Wendy and Winson were the testers of PixyLike proofing portal while it was still in beta stage. I can not be the judge of things and it might be due to their decisive nature, but they were done making a choice in less than a day! Ok, I will take the credit for PixyLike- it did enable them to select their favorite photos that quickly! ;)

As for me- already then, while still being beta, PixyLike was a great way of dealing with large amount of images. I ended up having to finalize post-processing on less than 200 photographs. Avoiding to process in detail remaining 1300 shots saved me a ton of time!

Finally I would like to thank one more time Wendy and Winson for allowing me to work with them! And Wendi's 'dad' Damien for being such help!

M.

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