You can’t fake fear like this

When I think “wedding day” immediately my thoughts go to a groom riding a lawn mower down a hill with a plastic owl in his hands being pushed by his groomsmen.

:-D

Not really, but when the opportunity presents itself to see and take pictures of such a sight, you can’t really refuse it can you. This started when one of the boys jokingly pushed the lawnmower through the back of the frame while I snapped a few formals of our groom Chris. Then came the owl and Mike Joy got in on it all with a hoe.

Suddenly, the boys are pushing Chris down the hill — with some sense of urgency I might add. It was all a good deal of fun and so was the rest of the day.

Though I think the height of the day came around sunset, when we wound up at Signal Hill as the beautifully sunny that it was, slowly came to an end. The fog settling amongst the city behind while the sun cut fading strokes of light through the tallest of the buildings.

Quite an interesting challenge on this day as it was questionable if it would rain and we were in The Wilds golf course. This is where some of the photography was to take place. The more it looked like rain, the more it looked like we were to be staying nearby.

However we got lucky. Though the ceremony was meant to be outdoors and subsequently it was moved inside, it managed to clear off and get quite sunny near the end of the afternoon.

It was still wet, rather windy and the prospect of rain had us looking over our shoulders. Working in a single location is always fun but it’s definitely a challenge.

Ultimately, everyone was happy and the highlight — save for maybe all the Come-From-Aways in attendance — was the Screech-In with a very, very smelly codfish.

A log drivers paradise.

It’s hard to resist the view over the pulp and paper mill in Corner Brook. You don’t realize the scale of the operation till you see someone walking amongst the endless stacks of logs which surely must surpass three stories in some places.

The mill manages 3.6 million aces and has been in production since 1925. With that in mind, you’d expect the island of Newfoundland to be bare but thanks to a sustainable forest management plan and public input, you’d be hard pressed to find any over forested areas.

Out at Cape Spear.

We had such an excellent time with this just-before-winter wedding I couldn’t wait to post the photos. Given how quick the sun went down we had to work quite fast to get in what we wanted to get in and ended up with a little bonus time to ditch the limo and gamble on Cape Spear, near dark, in November.

Needless to say it was dark, foggy and pretty creepy down in the old military bunkers.

The fog was so thick you could see your shadow against it about 3 feet away and looking through the viewfinder all I could see was black. I had Brian hold up his cell phone to give me something to lock focus on. I was literally shooting blind. To make the best of it, the one bright light we had — the flashlight app on my iPhone — died almost immediately.

But we battled through it and in the end it worked out, as you can see for yourself.

Beaker popping out for a look.

One of my favorite all time wedding pictures is the black+white rain shot that we snapped during Noleen and Scott’s wedding. Everything about it — to me — is awesome: The rain. The Light. The Top Hat. The Umbrella.

Right, I said rain. And it did. It was raining pretty darn hard at this point in the day. The little indented LCD screen that sits atop my Nikon literally had a pool of water in it that I had to keep flicking away. On top of that, we were on some pretty muddy grass and we were using remotely triggered flashes, aka: small supercharged bundles of electricity that probably shouldn’t be exposed to water… but we did it anyway.

With the conditions being what they were some definite out-takes but there was also Beaker. Yep, that Beaker. So fun.