Teenagers, Surprise Rainbows, and Saw Ceremonies
Stupid weather we've been having lately, eh? New England was mostly spared from the Canadian Wildfire Hellscape that hit most of the east coast earlier this month. I doubt that it's connected but since then the weather has been unpredictable and even the meteorologists have been consistently unable to predict what is going to happen. Since I shoot outside most of the time I have to track the weather on a number of apps and the apps have been wrong in both the long-term and short. Every shoot I had last week (including shoots that ended up being cancelled) had conditions completely different from what the apps forecasted, even up to an hour before they happened. This led to me getting drenched but also caused surprise rainbows which I'll show off later.
Friday I did graduation coverage and senior portraits for Hillside Boarding School in Marlborough, Massachusetts. I've shot for Hillside a few times, it's always pretty fun.
Then on Saturday I got to do an engagement session at one of my favorite locations ever, The Wiggly Bridge in York, Maine. I've shot the bridge many times, more specifically the long footpath leading to the bridge and Steedman Woods just beyond the bridge, which looks like a spooky island. I shot there at night once and really fell in love with it and have been desperately trying to shoot actual humans there ever since.
From The Wiggly Bridge two years ago
I would love to shoot people there at night since it looks so epic, but we had a stroke of luck on Saturday that was also pretty special.
Like I said, the forecasts have been wrong and I didn't know if this shoot was actually going to happen right up until it was go-time. It was supposed to rain all day, then just for the hour we were supposed to shoot for. I showed up and thought that it looked pretty clear so we went ahead with it. The weird weather gave us a magical little rainbow. The couple didn't believe me when I said that I had never done a couples shoot with a rainbow before. Then, after the photos were delivered the couple said that their friends and family didn't believe that the rainbow was real. I guess it would be pretty easy to fake a rainbow now with editing, especially with Photoshop's new generative AI, which is supposed to put me out of business. I could easily put a rainbow in any photo now with a few clicks. Here, let me try it.
Here's the first photo I saw this morning when I opened Twitter.
Now I'm going to prompt Photoshop Beta to generate a "dramatic sky with a realistic rainbow."
Boom. There you go. Photoshop will generate multiple versions for you to pick from and I kid you not this is the best looking one of the 6 options it gave me. The other versions were too silly to share. I feel pretty comfortable with my job security.
Enough silliness. Here are the rest of the cute engagement pictures.
On Sunday I headed town to Groton, Massachusetts to shoot a tiny little wedding at The Herb Lyceum, a FANTASTIC farm to table restaurant.
One of the things I love about shooting weddings is learning new ceremonial traditions. This wedding had a new one for me - a German wood sawing ceremony.
It was cool! Also this was the smallest wedding of the year, only 10 guests. Extremely chill. I got fed some delicious food.
It was a great time.
It was also the mother and father of the bride's 35th wedding anniversary so I did a little mini-session with them. Usually when I shoot with nervous couples I ask them to answer flirty little questions in each other's ears to loosen them up. I knew I had to be a little less playful with these guys so I just asked the mother what her husband's favorite movie was and they both cracked up and said in unison "CROCODILE DUNDEE!"
Afterwards I told the bride that I learned what her father's favorite movie was and she said "Oh yeah, Crocodile Dundee. You could have asked anyone here and they would have told you."
I have a double wedding weekend coming up including one at The Seacoast Science Center, which is basically an aquarium. Should be cool!