The Wedding From Hell

Okay, as promised, here are a few pictures from our time in Tampa. I ended up taking one camera and one lens. It made shooting tough sometimes, but also reminded me of the simplicity of photography sometimes. It all comes down to using what you have and making great images with what you've got: your own eyes. David A. Williams, one of the speakers that moved me so much, made a joke about "gear porn" for all the photographers out there that get hung up on having the latest and greatest. When some one asks him what kind of camera he has he simply says, "a black one."

Enough preaching. I'm just proud of some of the shots we got this weekend because of the fact that I did take minimal gear and we were shooting just for the heck of it. It's hard not to get caught up in all the rules of photography, but one of the biggest things I took away from this weekend is that rules are meant to be broken.

I'll start off with some images from the Wedding from Hell. The idea was to show a wedding where EVERYthing goes wrong and to demonstrate how some top photographers handle the situation.

Here Jen Bebb handles "Uncle Bob" played by Joel Wiebner. Uncle Bob's are the guys (most into "gear porn"... see above) who show up and think they can do a better job than we can. Which means they are ALWAYS in the way.


One of the obstacles was a too tall bride getting married to a too short groom. Cute couple!


The Bride played by photographer Bridget Joy and shot by Susan Stripling.


And I played around while they waited to trash the dress.



By trash the dress, I mean Bridget and the Groom, Rob Villena, jump in to the hotel pool.



And from there, Bridget moved to a super-cold fountain nearby.




That's all for now. If you want to see a slideshow of more of the Wedding From Hell, I've uploaded one here.

And I'll post some more in a bit from anti-party photo shoot at the Aquarium.

-Wes