A tale of 2 weddings: Nisha and Carl

With wine from France (red) and Argentina (white), an English band, Indian food and Australian photographers Nisha and Carl certainly know the meaning of multiculturalism. I was fortunate to spend Friday and Saturday taking a peek into their lives with my camera as my trusty companion as I covered their civil ceremony on the Friday and the Indian ceremony (and party!) on Saturday, and it's fair to say the days couldn't have been more different!

The civil ceremony was held at a registry office in a town hall with family and close friends in attendance. Carl wore a suit, Nisha a white dress, and the ceremony was finished in around 15 minutes before heading out the gardens on the ground for a few photos and some socialising. By contrast the Indian ceremony was a vastly more grandiose affair full of colour, fire, mandaps and bling (according to Nisha gangster rappers have nothing on her when it comes to bling - and I agree!). I tell you what, fire during a wedding ceremony is something Western weddings should really look into, there's something magical about the priest presiding over a fire and it opens up a world of photographic opportunities! Having never covered a Hindu wedding before (my previous Asian wedding was Muslim Bengali) I wasn't sure what to expect, or how long the ceremony went for, turns out it was close to 8 times longer than the civil ceremony at around 2 hours so my frenetic photography at the start slowed down to a more leisurely pace by the end!

One of the things I love about shooting weddings, especially here in the UK, is experiencing new things and tasting different flavours of life. I got to see the chaos of an Indian bride's house on the day of her wedding, meet the warm and generous family and friends of the couple and sample some delicacies that put Brick Lane to shame (including the hottest chicken tikka ever!).

Huge thanks go to the very talented Shane Lee who was second shooting with me while Danny lived it up in Italy and especially Nisha and Carl for being a great couple and running a tight ship which made my job much easier. Oh yeah, and thanks for dinner, a taste sensation.

Wedding: Anna and Ant (and an owl)

Anyone who's ever been to my folks' house will know that my mum collects owls. There's hundreds of them filing up several shelves in the living room, ceramic owls, wooden owls, an owl my brother made in pottery class in primary school (which doesn't really look exactly like an owl, but it's beautiful nonetheless) and even a stuffed owl perched upon a branch attached to the wall. Little did I know that they would cross my path again, years later, as a wedding photographer in London.

Yesterday Danny and I had the privilege of shooting the wedding of Anna and Antranik at the salubrious Montague on the Gardens hotel at Russell Square, London - a gorgeous venue with super helpful staff. The day was amazing, the weather perfect, venue ideal, speeches hilarious and bride glamorous, but the story of the day is the owls.

Anna loves owls, and Ant had tried fruitlessly to arrange for an owl to be there on their wedding day. Apparently there are trained owls which the ring bearer gives the ring to at the back of the room which actually fly to the alter to present the ring to the groom, how cool is that? Ant was unable to book this owl, and was unsuccessful at recruiting another owl after contacting various owl enthusiasts. Imagine his surprise then, when he walked through Russell Square on the morning of the wedding to discover some sort of owl awareness exhibition featuring, you guessed it, a whole bunch of owls!! Russell Square was less than 100m from the venue, and we'd planned to go there for photos anyway, this little touch of owl related magic was the absolute icing on the wedding cake (not literally).

Here are some of my favourite shots from the day, I've not been through everything thoroughly yet, and I know Danny's taken a bunch of amazing shots which I've not seen yet, but this is a bit of a taster. Can't wait to put the album together!























Big thanks go to Ant and especially Anna who was willing to stand in a fountain and run through flocks of pigeons in the name of getting great photos!!

Adelaide, Picasa and expensive photographers

Right, it's a bit of an eclectic mix of ideas in this instalment, but they all link together so bear with me.

Ok, where to begin? I guess this story starts several months ago when I attended a photography expo down in Hammersmith. One of the speakers was a chap by the name of Gary Fong, he's basically made a fortune as a photography entrepreneur, he was a very engaging speaker, had loads of great ideas, but if you wanted to hear more you had to fork out for his DVD (or buy one of his light spheres to get perfect lighting guaranteed in every situation - supposedly).

Fast track to today. On Saturday I'm shooting my first wedding of the season, really really excited about it, I've got my 5D2 waiting and ready to be unleashed and I just can't wait. I decided to get some inspiration by taking a look at what various photographers on the interweb are producing, so I decided to check out the aforementioned Gary Fong. I don't think he actually shoots many (any?) weddings any more, but I found this page which detailed his price list as at 2005. You have to admire a man who charges $120,000 for a day's shoot and passes it off as a discount on his usual rates!

I decided to check out his up to date blog, it seems that these days he just likes taking photos on his iphone. Fair play, it is a lovely gadget. One thing I found on his blog was an embedded slideshow, I did a bit of digging and discovered it was linked to Google's excellent Picasa photo editing / on-line display software. Brilliant, I've got most of my photos on Picasa already so with no additional work on my behalf I can now create on line web albums like the one below - a few shots I took when I was back home in Adelaide recently.



Next blog entry will have some wedding pics, the venue is stunning so stay tuned for some cool shots.

A new toy

What a week! I was woken this morning by a flash of light outside my window, several seconds later the unfamiliar sound of thunder followed, first time I've encountered lightning in London. I miss thunder and lightning, it puts things into perspective. But this was only 1 of many exciting things to happen this week.

You may have noticed a link to the right of screen for Simon Bills Photography on Facebook, yes, that's right, in an act of unrivalled self indulgence I have set up page whereby people can officially become "fans". Of course that's not how I see it, I just see it as a group of people who like photography, but I'm curious to see if any leads come from this foray into social network marketing.

As exciting as these things are there was something EVEN MORE EXCITING that happened this week (no, I'm not talking about the Netherlands beating England in the T20 world cup, or about Feds winning his long awaited French Open), my new Canon 5D Mk II arrived!! Woo hoo.







You know, until you've experienced 21 megapixels of camera it's really hard to feel like your life is in any way complete, I used to be happy with a mere 10 but now I realise how lacking my life was. I'm kidding of course, before Canon released the 5D mk II I was hoping for 15mp, but it seems like Canon have gone all out on the megapixel war while Nikon are taking a more sensible approach to camera development, either way it's unlikely I'll be shooting at full res very often for the time being as my trusty little laptop struggles a bit to handle 27mb RAW files! However, I have taken a few shots at full res and the results are absolutely stunning, the following 3 shots are various crops of the first image, I've reduced them in size and quality for the net so the original image is sharper than this appears, but you get the idea of the copping possibilities. This is also hand held (1/250) so sharpness would be improved had I used a tripod.







I've yet to properly put her through her paces, besides a quick walk to the supermarket to grab some delicious ingredients for a tasty lunch. There were a couple of interesting old cars along the way (check the licence plates on the Torino!) and some pigeons, but I'm looking forward to having a proper session, and I'm now even more exciting for the wedding I'm shooting on Saturday.









One of the reasons I wanted this camera, besides the full frame sensor and the benefits that brings, was the high ISO performance. ISO is basically how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light, the higher the number the more sensitive and the better it is for light light shooting (dark churches etc). The next 3 images are more for the camera heads out there but I've tested at ISO 1600, 6400 and 25600 by shooting in jpeg and applying no PP work in Lightroom.

ISO 1600


ISO 6400


ISO 25600


These are hardly scientific tests, no tripod and the subject isn't the best, but you get the idea that you can get great results at 1600, decent results at 6400 and at a stretch you could probably use 25600 but I wouldn't recommend it.

One of these days I'll take advantage of the full HD video this puppy offers and put a video together, but don't hold your breath, I need to get some video editing software and learn how to use it first and at the moment I've got bigger fish to fry.