I’ll cover your flank or not a back seat driver

I met Lindsay Lack about 3 years ago, I think, when I put together a gathering of local news and documentary photographers for a night of drinking and pictures. She and her hubby had just recently moved to Denver from Iowa where she had finished a few internships after graduating from the Missouri journalism school. Great gal, good shooter. I kept in touch with her and she quickly became my assistant and friend.

 

Well as anyone knows getting started as a photographer is tough and wanting to be an editorial/news photographer is even tougher given the contraction of the market.  Put on top of that the small Denver market and her options were slim. So when she told me last year that she was making a go at the documentary wedding market I knew that she would do well. What I didn’t expect was her to ask if she could hire me as her assistant on her big jobs. Sure!

 

Now as I’ve said before shooting weddings can be a lot of fun if the client is going to let you have fun with it. But take me out of the situation where I have to answer to a potentially crazy mother of the bride and can just run around and make photos? Mmm, that sounds not too bad. So I agreed. She showed the clients my web page and didn’t seem to mind my modest fee. So she booked me for some weddings this year and so far they have been a blast. The two of us work well together and have a similar enough style as to let our pix mesh. It’s really nice to not be responsible for anything at a shoot other than to make photos and during the portraits drag around a lightstand. At the end of it all I hand her my trusty old Epson P-2000 that I loaded all my pix onto and she hands me a check. Huzzah!

It's funny to me that she likes to refer to me as her "lighting wiz" when I prefer to not light almost anything in these situations. Ambient is more interesting, faster, less obtrusive and with my lovely f/1.4 lenses and the low light capacity of my Nikon D700 bodies - pretty easy! I do like to bring in a single off camera strobe to spot light people when they turn the reception into a black hole for the dancing part. But again with Nikon's amazing CLS system it's a snap! My fave lens for all this stuff is my beloved Nikon AF-D 28mm f/1.4.

Here are a few of my faves from the last one we did.

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

Oh and the last one is with a strobe held in my left hand that is snaked around the dude in front of me. Sneaky huh?