Wedding Photography Melbourne

Eve and Nathan’s wedding was unusual because it was held on a Friday. I woke early in the morning to find it was raining, generally a bit of a downer for everyone. After arriving at the venue, the beautiful Ravensthorpe, just a little south of Wollongong, the rain was still a little stop-start but that didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirits.

I’d met Eve and Nathan a few months earlier and I knew they would make a ridiculously attractive couple on their wedding day. Eve looked stunning even before she had put on her wedding dress, a sign of generally much better things to come.

The girls were getting ready in the main part of the house while the boys were in a small annex off to the side. As most Aussie boys tend to be, they were pretty relaxed having enjoyed a game of tennis in the morning and having a couple of quiet beers before the big moment arrived. As I said at the start of this post, the wedding was held on a Friday afternoon. The venue is a little south of the city and there’s one main arterial road which travels south from the city, which at times like Friday afternoon and Saturday morning turns into a parking station. The rain obviously didn’t help things at all and there were numerous people, including the celebrant who were stuck in traffic with a decent delay in getting things started. No one was flustered though, patience was shown all round.

It was somewhat fortuitous that the wedding had been delayed by an hour or so as the rain abated for a small 45 minute window giving me an opportunity to get some shots of Eve and Nathan. Eve had been keen to use this large paddock with a beautiful magnolia tree that was right next to the venue and had gone as far as to check with the farmer that owned the land that the rampaging bull which paraded around the paddock was going to be locked away in another field.

Some things are worth getting your dress and feet a little dirty for!

A friend and I entered a competition where we were randomly paired up with a band and asked to create a video clip within 72 hours. We heard the song for the first time on Friday night and after having a chat to the band and finding out the kind of clip they wanted, we went about brainstorming the clip well into the night and completing some of the pre-production. Around 65 hours later, we produced, shot, edited and colour graded a 4 minute 20 second video clip having had about 8 hours of sleep in entire time. In the end we didn’t win any of the prizes on offer but I thought it was a pretty damn awesome effort for just the two of us (considering some other teams had 8 or 9 members). Additionally, being called Team MacGyver wasn’t a coincidence, we didn’t have any of the fancy gear that most film crew own, just a nice camera (the Canon 5D MkII), lenses and a bit of ingenuity. For example, we wanted to shoot 2.35:1 but since the camera shot 16:9, we ended up having to put a piece of plastic with boundaries drawn onto it to be able to frame the video properly. MacGyver would have been proud of us.

Here’s the final product! The band loved the clip and while there are a couple of small technical things that we still notice, it was a pretty amazing learning curve for two guys who’d never shot a video clip before and we’re pretty happy with our efforts.