Asley and Spence's Wedding Album

Here's a quick video I did of Ashley and Spence's wedding album. The album is planned to be a traditional 10" square design, resulting in 20x10 2-page spreads. This is a flush-mount design, meaning that the pages are printed as composite images, rather than printed individually and matted into an album. The look is more contemporary - like a magazine spread. This is the first draft of the Album. Ashley and Spence were given a high resolution electronic version of the album in Adobe Acrobat for review, but the resulting file, at 15 MB, is too large to share with family and friends, so I created this video here, and a higher resolution HD version published on YouTube that you can also view by clicking here.

The ceremony was held at The Church of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Jacksonville, with the reception held at the Flemming Island Country Club. Both were simply wonderful venues, and I can't wait to photograph at either venue again. I just love the German stained glass at this church.

Music is "The Wedding March" performed by guitarist Michael Lancaster.

Church of the Immaculate Conception

This stunning panorama was taken during Ashley and Spence's wedding, and highlights the dramatic interior of this landmark church. I'm hoping this photo will be a 2-page spread in the couple's album. I'm seriously considering a canvas for myself to hang for my clients to see when they visit my residential studio.

The stained glass is German. During some recent renovations, the glass was cleaned and restored to it's original beauty. I fell in love with stained glass while on temporary assignment in Portugal and Spain, which gave me ample time to visit many churchs. Unlike here in the United States, churches in much of Europe stay open and are busy with tourist traffic all year round. This gave me a lot of opportunity to see a lot of very old churches.

This photo was taken from the balcony of the church. Father Murphy was very forgiving in allowing me nearly full access to the church during the ceremony.

The Rings

Another tradition in wedding photography is to photograph the rings, and many photographers study this very intently. By their very nature, jewelry tends to provide many reflections and spectral highlights that make them difficult to photograph. More than simply a "product shot," though, in wedding photography we must place the rings in some sort of context. I think these elements from Spence's uniform and the wedding invitation really put the rings in context for the day's event.



This is a standard that I've come to really like. If the light's just right, rings in the spine of a bible will form a shadow in the shape of a heart. Instead of a bible, I used a hymnal, since there was a dated entry that helps tie back to the wedding day itself.

Remember, you can click on the images to load a larger image. Also, just because there are no comments here on the blog, doesn't mean people don't like them and are commenting on them. Check out my Facebook Notes to see comments left by those who are following the blog through Facebook.

Immaculate Conception Church

Ashley and Spence were married on July 10th at the Immaculate Conception Church. The only clear view of this church is from immediately across the street, and my regular wide angle lens was not wide enough to capture this enormous, nearly cathedral size church. So I reverted to taking photographs in sections, and combining them into a mosaic, carefully splicing, adjusting perspective, and oh, yes, cloning out the homeless man perched on the steps.

Not quite sure yet how this photo will be featured in the album, but it will have to have some prominence. It was very important to Ashley and especially Spence's family, who attends this church regularly, that the wedding be held here.

Wait until you see the interior!

For more about the church and it's history, please visit The Immaculate Conception Catholic Church of Jacksonville web site.

The Wedding Dress

It's something of a tradition to photograph the wedding dress before the bride gets dressed. I hoped to reinforce this tradtion by capturing the image in black and white. The bride got ready in a small alcove beside the church foyer. Hanging the dress in the gate to the foyer allowed me to capture both the dress, and some details of the church.

Ashley and Spence's Wedding

Ashley and Spence were married last Friday, at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Jacksonville. I'm busy working through the photos, but Ashley was really looking forward to this photo being taken in front of the fountain in the church's courtyard.

I'll post more as I get some finished, so stay tuned!

Wedding Photography

Sorry - no picture today. I have something very serious I want to talk about. Something that's near and dear to my heart, and my profession.

I've been getting a few calls about the recent incident involving a Middleburg wedding photographer who's taken over 2 years to deliver the album he promised in 6 months. You can read the story on First Coast News' website.

This is more than just an embarrassment to our profession, but it's a needless tragedy. It's not about the money, or getting it back. It's about the photographs and the couple getting what should be their first family heirloom - their wedding album.

What really saddens me is that this really doesn't need to be an issue. The article ends with 5 suggestions for protecting yourself. I'd like to highlight that second suggestion - "Check to see if the photographer is a member of a professional association."

As you can see over to the right of this blog, I'm a member of several professional organizations. The most important one, though, is our local guild, the Professional Photographer's Society of North Florida. I'm a proud member of this guild. We put aside our competitiveness with each other for your business in order to help each other, to grow professionally, to raise the bar of artistic merit and craftsmanship in our work, and to help each other out so that things like this don't mean you're left hanging indefinitely for your products. If any of us stumbles, there's a dozen or more ready to pick things up and make things right.

Our guild's past president, Michael Joseph was interviewed by First Coast News regarding this incident. I encourage you to read the article and watch the video from the broadcast, as it highlights the importance of hiring a guild photographer.

Here's the mission statement of our guild:

The Professional Photographer's Society of North Florida is a guild of professional photographers, aspiring photographers and industry related businesses working together with the common goal of improving the photographic industry in North Florida by assisting each member with their career success and increasing professionalism in the industry by providing educational opportunities and promoting photographic excellence through Public Awareness.

I'm also a member of the Professional Photographers of America. Membership in this organization also requires malpractice coverage for all portrait and wedding photographers.

Having a backup plan is an important part of being a professional. Being able to offer this kind of assurance to my clients is important. Please don't assume that every photographer you come across has such a significant support system behind him. Unfortunately, Jennifer and Lee Matthews may not have known, and it seems something happened to their photographer, and they're left without a support system to take over where they photographer can't. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often, but why risk it with photographs that may very well be the most important photographs of your life?

While the guild is certainly under no obligation to "make right" this unfortunate situation, I'm sure there are many photographers, such as myself, who'd love to be the "Knight in Shining Armour," do the album, and save the day for the Mathews family. After all, we're all very charitably minded, with many guild members involved in charitable work such as Operation Love Reunited and Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep.

There are several logistical problems here, though. First off, the photographer, Kevin Winter Photography, has not given anyone the images to work with, nor has he released rights he retains as the copyright holder for the images. At this point, without Mr. Winter's cooperation in the matter, it would be impossible for anyone else to produce the album. Then there's a matter of the actual cost of producing the album itself. Without knowing the details from the contract between Mr. Winters and his client regarding the album promised as a deliverable (how many pages, what size album, cover material, and all the other details of his product), nobody can make the commitment to produce the album as specified in the contract.

There's no practical way to make the situation right, and that's a tragedy for everyone in our profession.