A short few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be asked to photograph for Louise and Mark at their wedding.  The weather was FOUL all through the week before and really hideous the week after, but they had a near-flawless day of gorgeous sunshine, the lucky things.

The details had been picked out incredibly well and really added something special to the wedding.  This gave me a lot to photograph and helped to create a 'story' of the day, I always like it when the bride and groom have selected and thought about details, it adds a lot more to the look and feel of the day than you might expect!

The flowers above were hand-picked and arranged by the bride and added a lovely and fantastically rustic feel to the day.  The bouquets for the bride however were stunning and very much created by a talented florist, they rightly drew a lot of compliments on the day (as well as a few jealous glances!).

http://www.traditionalflower.co.uk/

I was keen to get a photo of the bridesmaid's dress on the hanger, it turned out less technical to do this than try to get a photo of the bride's dress on the hanger and I was really happy with how this photo came out.

I think it's important to photograph the bride getting ready, it's all part of building the 'story' of the day and it's very popular to have a photo book printed to remember your day and these images will form a big part of it.

Arguably one of the best bits of a wedding (for the groom perhaps) is the car!  I really like this image just before the bride left for the church, after all the rushing around in the morning you need to unwind a little before heading of.

Approaching the church and I'm loving the bridesmaids with their last-minute flower rearranging, it was a very pretty (and tiny!) church.

After the ceremony we relaxed a bit and I love this shot of the newly weds with their wee one.  It's often the candid and informal shots that capture how a wedding felt and this one really does show how relaxed and enjoyable the day was.

After drinks on the lawn we were back to the barn for food, more drink and even some morris dancing from the local morris men (who all lined up for a kiss afterwards).

The Fleece Inn...
http://www.thefleeceinn.co.uk/
...is a fantastic venue, I couldn't fault the food and the service was very good.  They had a very healthy collection of cask ales on the go as well which is always appreciated!

I had invested in a new flash for the wedding and enjoyed using the wireless feature, it turned out to be very handy indeed for the first dance.  There was no white ceiling to bounce a flash from and any attempt to light directly wouldn't have looked right so I gave the flash to an assistant to hold and used it off camera.

  

Alys had made some of her fantastic door-stop squirrels to exhibit (and hopefully sell) at the Midcentury Modern fair in Dulwich and it was the perfect opportunity to try out the main and slave flashes for product photography.

This is the link to the Midcentury fair, there are always some fantastic pieces there and it's well worth a look.

http://www.modernshows.com/docs/shows/midmod/index.html

It took a while to get the lighting to look right, as I said in an earlier post when photographing dripping water, it's very easy to get harsh shadows. These look fine for the moody shots I was going for last time but wouldn't look right for these little guys.

It was a good chance to try out some (nearly) macro photography and the Sigma 24-70 EX DG lens really pulled out the stops for me. I had a bit of a problem at first getting the focus in the right place, but a lot of that was due to me trying to take these pictures while lying across the lounge floor. It's not completely happy wide open but seems to behave very well stopped down to about f4 although, saying that, shots at f2.8 are always usable.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with these photos. It was a really basic set-up, I used a roll of paper table cloth for the backdrop (you can see a bit of texture in the paper at the bottom of the squirrels and pincushions) and a jessops 360AFD flash on the sony alpha 200 to trigger the venerable Wotan SC 18 servo flash.
To soften the light I pointed the on-camera Jessops flash at the wall on one side and the Wotan at the wall and ceiling on the other. A reflector and/or soft box probably would have meant that I had a little more control but the white (and fairly low) ceiling meant that it worked out ok.
The jessops flash was a bit more powerful so I dialled it down a fair bit to match the Wotan's output. It's worked out quite well though and shows of Alys' latest creations very well I think.

In fact, I think it shows that an entry-level Sony Alpha 200 camera with some pretty basic equipment can take some very usable pictures. I'm happy with these and the full-size images (these have been compressed by me and probably by blog spot as well) would look good printed to A3 at least.

I picked up a VERY cheap slave flash a while back, it doesn't have anything really in the way of controls unless you count the "computer" that apparently meters the flash. It's brilliant, an SC 18 Wotan Servo flash, and even came in the original packaging, all for a tenner from Arundel Photographica.

http://www.arundel-photographica.co.uk/

It's a brilliant shop if you've never been and great fun to visit and browse through some really rare and unusual photographic equipment.

The best part of the package is the fact that it was designed as an 'off-camera' flash and has a screw fitting on the bottom to attach to a plate screwed to the bottom of your camera. This fits the standard tripod screw thread so I've stuck it on my gorilla pod tripod where it looks a bit war of the world-ish and fits anywhere where I need a spare flash.

Anyway, I gave it a whirl and decided to photograph water dripping from a tap. It took a little while to get the flash and light levels right, I used an on-camera flash as a trigger for the Wotan because the pop-up flash can't be convinced not to do a pre-flash. The second problem was balancing the light output from the Wotan through a combination of aperture and moving it further away. As far as I can tell the light metering computer on the Wotan doesn't do anything so I left it covered, the instruction manual would have you believe it's an amazing next step in flash technology which is charming, but it doesn't really do a lot.

It was more of an opportunity to play than anything else, but lots of fun and I tried a slow shutter speed of 1/6 s, a narrow aperture of 32 and iso 100 to see if the flash could freeze the action and leave a little bit of blur.

The first few pictures I tried (some earlier pictures of flowers not shown here) had fairly harsh shadows so I bounced the on camera flash (a jessops 360afds) of a nearby white wall and this filled out those shadows quite nicely. I later bounced both flashguns of the ceilings and walls and while a bit soft for these water photos it will be handy for product photography and possible weddings.

This picture shows the benefit of using a slow shutter with flash, you can see the trail from the water drips as well as a couple of frozen drips in mid-air. It took more than a few shots to get the splash as well as the drips but it was a fun experiment and it's good to see a couple of bits of 'water shrapnel' flying away from the splash.

Finally I turned of both flashes to see what a fast shutter speed could do and although the Sony a200 and Sigma 24-70 struggled to find a focus point on the water I liked the result. I've given it a LOT of contrast in photoshop and it's not as sharp as I would like but it's a decent black and white.

Some of these pictures will be appearing soon on my website;

www.edwardbryan.co.uk