Time for me to Toot My Horn !

I want to start this off by saying that I hardly ever toot my horn. But this weekends VERY SMART bride and groom are very lucky that they chose me as their wedding photographer instead of one of those "Shoot and Burn" photographers. A Shoot and Burn photographer is one that will show up at your wedding, take about 800 or more snapshots "many redundant" and then burn them to a CD and give them to you with no color correction or cropping ect. No Album no page design, just a CD full of photos by a beginner who has the best of intentions but not much experience.
I will set the stage. The photo of the Groom and his Mom was shot next to a hallway at chateau Elan . The same location that is in the photo on the opening page of my web site. The photo of the bride was "RETAKEN" (more in a minuet) in the seats that the wedding guest sat in.
The reason the bride photo was retaken was that right after I shot this photo the first time , some ass wipe snuck over to my camera bag a picked it clean of all the gear that was in it. I lost 2 high end digital camera bodies. A Nikon D 200 with battery grip and 2 batteries and a Fuji S-3 and Four lenses. All Nikon. an 80-200 2.8 12.5 mm fisheye 85mm 2.8 and a 50mm 1.8 and a light disk color balance device.
The strange part is that I was only a few feet away when it happened. I finished shooting the bride and individual bridesmaids photos like the one of the groom and mom in the hall next to the area where the wedding was to be held. That was done with the camera on the tripod. See the photo below.

I took that camera and 80-200 lens off the tripod and put it in my gear bag. I picked up my other D200 (I had 2) and photographed the bride in the chairs with the 85mm 1.8 lens while the bridesmaids were moving to a spot I asked them to go to. Total time about 1 minuet. After shooting the bride I put that camera back in the bag and picked up the other D200 and changed to a wide angle zoom lens , an 18-70mm , and walked around the corner to shoot the group photo of the bridesmaids. The timestamp on the file of the bridesmaids showed 5:35pm and the next photo, a candis of her mom back at the hall location showed 5:36 a one min time span ! While I shot the Bridesmaids some one stole everything left in my bag. INCLUDING all of the images shot on the Nikon D200. The Fuji was a backup camera and had not been used. I quickly searched the area, did not tell the bride ( As to not freak her out) called security and with now about 15 min until wedding time, ran out to the parking lot to scan the scene and to change into my suit. (In the parking lot next to my truck) Cheatu Elan's security cameras caught that but not the theft.
A snappy , snappy, snappy, burn and shoot photographer would have melted down about that time. I did not. The wedding was going to go on . On time and I had to photograph it. This is where experience comes in. You see, I have been photographing weddings for 27 years. Longer than many of my brides have even been alive. Way back in the good old days we shot something called film. We could only bring as much film as we could afford to shoot. It used to cost about $1.25 every time we pushed the button on the camera so we did not blow a lot of shots just to have something to do during a 4 hour reception or on tons of candid photos that we knew would never make it into the wedding album. Snappy snappy snappy photographers do not understand that quality is so much better than quantity.
Another problem that I had was that the stolen Nikon camera had my other two camera batteries in it. And since the camera that I still had was the one I had been using most that day, a good bit of it's battery power was drained. I knew I had to conserve my shots for the very best ones. And I did. Very much to the dismay of the brides sister who felt that I should be in the reception photographing various people while they were stuffing food in their mouths. (I never shoot that anyway) I was across the room when I saw the brides sister screaming at someone on her cell phone. Two hours later when I checked my messages, I found out that it was me she was screaming at. Saying that she did not see me and that I was missing the entire wedding and that she (not my bride or groom) demanded that I be in the room with her. I was, she just did not see me as I was not photographing her or her kids on the dance floor as I had already done and had the shots of them that I needed My cell phone was in the truck, but I wish I had had it and could have walked up behind her as she was screaming and tapped her on the shoulder. Then took her photo. But my bride and groom were great. You can tell they are so much in love. And he loves her even more than golf. And from what I heard from guests, that is a lot.

So Early this morning, I was calling friends to get back up gear , lenses and extra special camera batteries so that I can shoot tomorrow. I will replace about $ 8000.00 worth of gear on Tuesday.

So, how was your weekend ? Please e mail or post. Yeah POST that would be such a nice gesture from the 342 people that have visited this blog more than 10 times each. I do keep track .