Wonderful, Atypical Weddings

I have said here before that I generally do not shoot weddings. Sure they are lucrative, but part of me rebels against supporting the over indulgence that is a contemporary wedding. I have been to too many $20-30,000 weddings of people who really should be having a $5,000 wedding so they do not start their life together under a crushing cloud of debt. Not my call of course, but I do not have to be a part of that process. So I only shoot one or two weddings a year, and they have to be FUN and otherwise interesting, and especially low key.

Over the last couple of years my weddings have included a couple that got married (handfasted, actually) in a creek while their guests sat on shore. Right on. My kind of quirky. The other stand out of the past couple of years was a couple that had been married for 20 years had a formal ceremony to add another man to their marriage. Not legal, of course, but nevertheless, that was their sincere desire and I have to say that it was among the most profound wedding ceremonies I have ever attended. The words they said, each to the other two, were heartfelt and loving in a way most weddings never come close to.

I started this year with a wedding. While nowhere near as out of the ordinary as the aforementioned ceremonies, it was fun and their guests were clearly there because they WANTED to be there. And the wedding portrait portion got to include this:



Now how can a guy turn down a chance to shoot a beauty like that? Too bad it was January and the light was fading fast. It would have been fun to hang around for half an hour or so so that the herd would have become familiar with me, and vice versa. I did get a couple of good ones of the bride with her llama and the groom looking on with a big smile. It is photographs like this that make editing a treat.

OK, back to work!