Illustration Friday - Jan 26 - Red

A photo illustration I did in Photoshop using various filters and layers (click on image to enlarge). The image is from a wedding that I photographed last week. Approximately 5 minutes after the wedding, I came down with influfenza, the real thing, and have been in bed coughing up a lung for a week.

Here are more pics from the wedding. The couple, Nick and Andi made my job real easy by being such beautiful people. How could I screw that one up?

True Confessions: (I'll confess my ugly shoe purchases in a later post and yes, the boys toe nails in the photo below ARE painted green)

Every time I shoot a wedding, a couple of hours before the event I'm nervous (more nervous than the bride usually) and sweaty and feeling a little queasy. Well, that could have been the flu this time, but in every other case its been a serious case of classic stage fright. About 5 minutes before I'm supposed to be there I'm running through my head every plausible excuse I can give for not being able to do the job, including sending a ransom note from Guatemalan kidnappers.

A good friend of mine is a mural artist who creates huge room size murals for rich-people's homes in California, doing them right in their big fancy schmancy houses. She admitted she suffers from the same performance anxiety or stage fright as I do, and in a girl-to-girl counseling session gave me her best advice: Just start it, just begin, don't think, just do, just take the first shot, just look thru the lens and focus and it will all come back. She admitted that she has to FORCE herself to make the first brush stroke. WOW, I thought... and she's really good and professional and charges people A LOT for her stuff, and still has this angst like me? My "stage fright" had gotten so bad that I had considered not photographing weddings anymore. Why do something that makes me uncomfortable or makes me feel yucky? Life is too short!

Now that I realize what's going on in my brain, 3 to 4 hours before the event I have to lay down and meditate (which hopefully leads to a 1/2 hour nap) and then I go online and review my wedding photos and past shots. About an hour before the event I walk the beach, since it changes from moment to moment, looking for clear sand and nice water. I come back, drink a big glass of cold water and then I head out on my boy's bike in my dressy skirt and camera bag. (Yes girls, you can ride a bike in a skirt, just keep your knees together. Oh, yea, I should mention, it shouldn't be a SHORT skirt either)

For this wedding there was no such luck with the sea. All up and down the shore, from end to end it looked like the sea had upchucked its lunch by disgorging tons of seagrass on the beach overnight and the breeze had driven it ashore in foot high berms. So I made the best of it camoflauging it as best I could and shooting around it.

And at the end of it all, it was another great day with happy people full of love and joy. It was bound to rub off on me!