He Adores Her

The focus of most weddings is on the bride. She garners about 50% of the attention, while the groom gets about 20%, and then details, other people, venue, food, test shots and cheesy-self-photos of the photographer in the hotel room mirror get the remaining attention. Women/brides are naturally smiley. Dudes/grooms are usually tough, and will smile when someone says something funny. So nothing impresses me more than seeing a groom so overwhelmed with love and happiness for his wedding that they’re in a great mood and smiling all day. This is what happened yesterday with Jeremy’s wedding to Jessica. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her and every time she said something he grinned from ear to ear. Even though they’ve been together a while, you have to be jealous of any couple whose very presence brightens their day. This was my first wedding with the Nikon D4. It almost makes me wonder how I did them with the D700 (and astounding that I did 18 weddings with my D200). This was taken in a virtually dark reception hall with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR1 at ISO 8000 using the AUTO ISO function limiting the ISO to 12,800 with a minimum shutter of 1/100th. There was no noise reduction done on this and as you can see on the original size, amazing noise control. Focused quickly and the snap was like a gun. I did virtually the entire reception in the dark, no flash. Lenses focus about 30% faster with the D4 and it can see/focus in utter darkness. I’ll need it for the wedding on Saturday as I’m at the Annenberg Beach House photographing an evening wedding with no ceiling/walls to bounce flash from.