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anahi+edgar

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Venue / Caterer: Bonne Terre Inn
Wedding Cake: Miss Muff'n Bakery
Dress: All About Weddings
Hair & Makeup: Farrah Taylor at Capelli
Flowers: Elise Ladley

Would you hire a construction worker to put braces under a collapsing roof that had a tool box from the kids isle at Home Depot? No…of course not.  So why would you hire someone who uses consumer grade photography gear?  My point with this post is to enlighten brides, whether you book with me or not, it’s important to know what a photographer is using, that they have back-up gear, that they know how to use their gear fully and whether they have back-up’s of your files at home or not.

My Nikon Pro Equipment

Now of course, not everyone is going to have the above and I wouldn’t expect them too, this has taken years to acquire and some people do well with less or some have better.  The above includes twin Nikon D3 cameras, FIVE Nikon SB-900 flash units, the hebrew trinity of zoom lenses; the 14-24 2.8G, 24-70 2.8G & the 70-200 2.8G VRII and two primes lenses; Nikon 60 2.8 Micro & a Sigma 85 1.4. So what’s makes these items Pro? First the Nikon D3 cameras handle low-light exceptionally well and one of the biggest benefits besides sheer speed and quality is the dual card slots.  Most cameras today have a single card slot and if that card is to fail or become corrupt, unfortunately, your wedding images may not be retrievable.  With the pro bodies like the D3, the second card slot acts as a back-up to the first.  So every shot I take is saved two times!  Not only that but I shoot dual cameras, one is for wide and the other is for telephoto, then means that in the freak event that two cards fail in one camera, the entire wedding is being recorded by the other camera.

The lenses are considered pro, at least the ones with the gold rings because of their weather sealed bodies, fast apertures and coating for sharpness and flare resistance.  This may not make much sense to people who don’t know about camera but trust me, it makes a huge difference over kit lenses or anything else.  Each of my lenses serve a very specific purpose but in the event that I loose multiple lenses for whatever reason, I can still shoot the wedding without a problem…that’s what I call back-up.

Then I have 5, yes FIVE Nikon SB-900 flashes.  These are Nikon’s flagship flash units, they are powerful, soft and controllable.  They give a much better result that any other flash on the market that I’ve tried. Having 5, I can place them wherever I want and create “texture, dimension and mood” ~ Cliff Mautner.

Then at home, how are your files safe?  Well I have a Drobo unit with 4 hard drives, this is 4 redundant back ups of your files and on any wedding I haven’t completed, I back that up to another external drive.  Once files are completed, I upload full-resolution files to my online company that stores them for me.  Redundancy is key here folks.  Its the most important day of most people’s lives, why risk anything?

The wedding was at the Hilton and I have to say the lounge area near the water made me drool! Hammocks tucked into the trees and chairs scattered across the sand…it was enough to propel me into a “it’s 5:00 somewhere” daydream.  I ended up back in Key Largo last weekend and may or may not have ended up at the resort.  I may or may not have pretended to be a guest, took a snooze in a hammock, or enjoyed a beverage while watching the sun go down! This “resort crasher” has her lips sealed!

One thing that amazed me about this wedding was the calmness and persistence of the couple who got married during Hurricane Irene which caused a mess on the east coast, even though it didn’t wreck NYC as much as predicted. We met up with them on Friday for their rehearsal dinner which was amazingly decorated and happened in their backyard of their complex. We shot a little engagement session beforehand.

Then the next day we woke up to some serious rain and didn’t know what we were going to be expecting on the wedding day. The venue they were going to have, the Highline Park, had to close. They also scheduled a restaurant to hold their reception was one of the only things still open, but were closing at 2pm ahead of the impending storms. They also had a boat ride in the harbor canceled. So we all didn’t know what to expect. But the restaurant decided, last minute, to allow them to hold their ceremony and dinner at the venue as long as they finished before 2pm. So we had to get hair and makeup done quickly and cruise to the venue and get everything done. Since the subways and tunnels were closed all day, they had about a third of the expected guests able to show up. The ceremony was beautiful and they had amazing words spoken. It was awesome to see them never complain and having smiley faces all day.

After the awesome craziness that was the actual wedding day, I stayed an extra couple days in NYC, which turned out awesome because on the following Monday NYC got back to normal and we all decided to go out and shoot again. We started on the roof of their apartment building in the West Village, which is my ultimate favorite spot now in NYC. We also shot later in the exact spot that they had previously planned to have their wedding, The Highline Park.