Rangefinder Magazine
January 2005

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The Last Word

Hurricane Ivan decided to make its way up the East Coast just enough to affect the weather for the wedding I was shooting on September 18, 2004. I tend to take bad weather personally. When I know the weather is not going to be ideal for one of my weddings, I lose sleep thinking about how I’m going to produce compelling images when I’m stuck inside the venue. Fortunately for the bride, Jennifer Ott, and me, we had a little window of opportunity to make some pictures outside after the ceremony.

Jennifer was an incredibly statuesque, poised and exuberant bride. She was clearly a bride who “gets it” and was totally into being photographed. Generally, the two most important elements for a great portrait session for me are great light and great chemistry between the bride and groom. On this day, one out of two would have to do because the natural light was almost nonexistent. After making a few stops for photos along the route to the reception, I let the limo driver know I was interested in making another stop near Strawbridge Lake in Moorestown, NJ.

While this location was nothing special I was able to capture some fun interaction between Jennifer and her new husband, Peter Stansky. I then noticed our brief window of clear weather was about to end. When I looked up, the sky had turned an ominous shade of near black—enough to make the Addams family feel right at home. I knew I needed to capture that sky quickly somehow and asked my assistant to grab my Nikon SB 800 Speedlite from my bag.

The only logical way to use the sky was to shoot directly up into it. I lay down flat on my back on the rain-soaked grass with my 17–35mm f/2.8 AF-Nikkor lens on my F5. I had an SC-29 TTL cord attached to the F5 and had my assistant holding the SB-800 off camera at about 90 degrees and pointing it up at Jennifer. I made about 25–30 frames with Jennifer standing directly above me holding Peter’s hand as they just goofed around. The decisive moment occurred when she threw both arms up while holding her veil, which aided the composition for me. I was shooting manually at f/5.6 and playing with the shutter speed from 1⁄30 to 1⁄125 in an attempt to underexpose the sky a bit and let the TTL flash from the SB-800 do its thing to give Jennifer a bit of fill from the side. My black-and-white film of choice is Ilford XP2 Super. The only manipulation to this image was a slight vignette I added in Photoshop CS. I made it sepia, and used a little dodging to the side of her face. I was excited about this series of images and could not wait to see them. My only issue was that I was soaking wet for most of the reception.

Cliff Mautner will be a speaker at WPPI 2005, March 19–24 at BALLY’s Las Vegas. His program is entitled, “Editorial Vision in Wedding Photography.”