Jamie got married, and I took a bunch of photos!

My sister Jamie got married in Reno last week. It was a great time, and I took a bunch of pictures, but I don't want to steal all her thunder, so I'm just going to post a few I thought were pretty funny, or ones that the photographer probably didn't get.

Here's Jamie and Rudy coming out of the Temple:






I needed to be the center of attention for a minute tooThere was a LOT of picture taking. I like taking photos, but I definitely do not like to have to stand and be photographed over and over again. It gets tedious pretty quickly!One of the funniest things at the Temple. Cassidy came out, look around for a minute or two, and then headed straight to the car for a Pepsi!

We were just fooling around. Jamie and I used to have this thing where we would kind of wrestle with each other. The surest way to get out of a hold was to lick the person

Rudy and Jamie had this great idea for all the groomsmen to form a human pyramid and then they would be on top.

I'm sure it was a great idea, if you got to be on top, but at the bottom, it wasn't nearly as fun!

Also, someone asked how did she get up there in a wedding dress. Getting up is easy, you just climb up. The real question is how to get down!Luckily Cassidy gave her a piggy back ride of sorts, and she kind of slid down
The grass was pretty soggy, but the bridesmaids gave us their sandals to kneel on.


After the ceremony we went to the church and had a luncheon for the families. Some friends of the Garcia's are known for their BBQ tri tip, and they cooked up a bunch for us all to eat. Of course it was delicious!

After lunch we had about 4 hours until the reception officially started, so I had to find something to do with the time. After buying about 20 bags of salad mix, and a bunch of fruit I still had some time to kill. My friend Erin was hired by Jamie and Rudy to take their official photos, so her and I decided to go out in the parking lot while there was some nice diffused light and do a little photo session. I broke out my lighting gear, to show Erin some basic off camera light techniques. Erin is more of an available light shooter, whereas I like to bring my own light to help with what's available.

Sam, Rudy's younger brother was up to no good, so we used him for our model.

I started with just a basic ambient light shot:

but after a few tweaks and adjustments I ended up with something I'm a little more proud of:He has gone from being flat, to a more realistic 3D look, and he now stands out from the background.

After a few more poses, we moved to a brick wall, and grabbed Esther, Rudy's little sister

I'm pretty proud of these three pictures, especially the one in the middle. I have had all these techniques rolling around in my head, but I just got a grid for my flash a few weeks ago and this was my first time using it in the hard light/soft light configuration that I've been reading about for a while now. A mission companion of Rudy's was asked to sing a few songs at the reception. He sang several Micheal Buble tunes, and was just awesome! You rocked the house Paul!Dad made the cake, and it was as good as it looks!Here the happy couple is getting ready to stab cut the cake

They were nice to each other and didn't smear cake all over each other -- kind of let us all down!I've known Jamie a good long while, and I don't know if I've ever seen her this happy. Here's to a long happy life together!





Jamie wanted to dance with me. Her dress was so fun to spin her around in!

And here I am breaking out my best moves:
Straight out of 1990, the running man!

While Jamie and Rudy were up dancing these two little hooligans came and ate the cake right off their plates!I guess its OK now that Jamie is their Aunt though
Rudy's Mom, and his Uncle (Ricky I think) were wonderful dancers
And after Jamie got changed out of her dress she got a turn to dance too


I didn't know she could dance like that!

After all the dancing we all ran out to watch Jamie and Rudy drive off. I couldn't help but notice the skyIt was just awesome!

I was standing next to Erin, the photographer, and I looked at her and then the sky and she was like "yea, that is so cool!"

I had grabbed one of my lights as we were following Jamie and Rudy out to the door, and slid it onto my camera. It had this big goofy looking softbox on the light. You can see it here on the light stand:

Just imagine how funny it looks sitting on top of a camera!

I could see that the sky was starting to turn orange and red, and I couldn't let the opportunity for a great photo go by, so I grabbed Sam who was standing next to me and started taking pictures

I took a few with the flash sitting on top of the camera, wishing that I could take it off. then I remembered that my camera could talk to this one flash in a special commander mode, so I took it off, set everything and handed it to a voice activated light stand. I asked Esther to stand in for me and took a few more photos.

As soon as everyone started seeing how good this was looking they all wanted photos!

Here's Rudy's sister Mara, and her husband David:Esther and Barby, who I think is a cousin:
And Rudy's older sister Ruth and her husband Jordan:This is Barby again, but I'm not sure who the others are:
And by this time the sky had pretty much faded away

Erin has a little blog where she writes about her family adventures, and the most current post is about her trip to Reno. I recommend you take a look! She's got lots of pictures, and her own spin on traveling to a far away city to shoot a wedding.

For more pictures of the wedding I've got about 30 or so I've posted to facebook, some of which are here, many others are not. It's a public album, you don't need to log in or anything like that if you're not into the social media scene. Also, lots of people have left comments, so that's always fun to see too.

I bought some photography DVDs from the strobist blog, and had just finished watching them a few days before the wedding. There were 7 discs I think, the first couple were video of a lighting seminar he gave, and the last discs were on location shoots, where he walked through everything he was thinking about and discussed the why and how, and all the nuts and bolts of each shoot.

One location shoot he did was in a high school gymnasium where he was taking pictures of the school's basket ball star. I started thinking how much a high school gym and a church gym looked pretty similar. I set up my lights just how he did in the DVD, and I'll be danged if what he taught didn't work pretty well! As the night went on, I learned where to stand in relation to my lights, and the pictures got better and better.

Another location shoot he did was a swimsuit model in front of the setting sun. Hmm, no swimsuits, but everything else worked just the way he said it would. Pretty amazing stuff.

I had known for a while that I was kind of stuck on a plateau photography wise. I had taught myself as much as I could by reading. To get better I knew I was going to need to attend some classes or something, but they can be expensive, and by the time you add in the expense of travel, and lodging they get really expensive. I'm glad I bought these DVD's, they are really teaching me a lot!