It was a wonderful shoot with Barrie and Ari, who were game to cross a highway and brave the winter-like temperatures and winds of a riverside night for this.
We are glad also for the magic sauce that allowed us to be comfortable shooting portraits for the gorgeous ambient at 1/100th, 135mm f/1.8, ISO 8000.
Photo of the Day
Grand Central engagement photo /
Man, we love looking back at pictures and re-seeing them through new edits. We love the color of city lights, but a beautiful black and white moment also lived in this photo all along. There are reasons we deliver every image to clients in both color *and* black and white.
It can strike a subtly (or sometimes starkly) different tone, make for a very different album or collage to put together, or just show you images you've seen for years in a new way.
Rockleigh Wedding /
There are a lot of reasons I'm glad this photo exists, but the most simple one is that if I told people the story of this photo without the proof, they probably couldn't imagine exactly how rainy it was.
It was so rainy that it took seven different umbrellas to make this photo happen -- for the couple; for Tatiana holding the flash; for the flash; for me, and then for the people holding all of these other umbrellas.
It's a story also about how we should feel free to cut loose at the end of the wedding, but above all it's a story of trust. It takes quite a bit to come outside in rain like this in a wedding dress, serenaded by storm warnings blaring in the background on 200 guests' iPhones, and we'll always be grateful.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden wedding photo /
Sony A9, Canon 45mm T/S @ f/2.8, 1/500th, ISO 500
We were just down in Miami for Sara and Joseph’s amazing wedding at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, and as soon as we started scouting it we had a problem: There were so many amazing spots that in a few minutes of looking around we got about eight hours worth of portrait ideas. But we made our own path and found this secret grove of banyan trees, knowing how much they both loved them, letting them enjoy a few minutes together before the lovely chaos of the wedding day began.
Thanks to planner Michael Masi for putting this amazing day together!
New York Botanic Garden wedding photo /
I admit I never fully appreciated the set of modern or abstract art that makes you think “Is this wonderful or is it terrible?” This probably has helped with wedding photography, which has at least some objective-ish measures: broadly speaking, you are flattering someone or not, you are capturing a powerful moment or not.
But as with any art, it also is highly subjective. Sometimes we will process an image that we didn’t realize we had already processed for the preview and end up with an entirely different look, both of them valid approaches. And when I first delivered this photo I liked it but it wasn’t even my favorite one from the location. Now I just came back to it and everything about it felt electric to me.
Hopefully it hits you right away too. But if not, that’s OK … come back in six months.
501 Union Wedding Ceremony: A Flower Girl's Perspective /
A sweet moment of anticipation from the flower girl’s perspective.
Hilton Pearl River wedding /
The basic action of a camera is to take a fleeting slice of time and make it last.
Those moments are meaningful when they say something about the way things are beyond themselves. This slice of time is 1/125th of a second in a hectic, chaotic bedeken, but shows so much about the love of a daughter and father, spread over a lifetime.
Ramsey Golf Club wedding first kiss /
Even though it may not always feel like it, wedding photographers have a great deal of autonomy on wedding days, which means one of the core skills of the job are being able to make good decisions very, very quickly.
You might think that first kisses don’t require any thought after we’ve done 1,000+ weddings. Far from it. This is still a split second that encapsulates so many months of planning and kicks off the biggest and most-defining part of life for most people, and a lot can go wrong.
Samantha and Matt’s wedding was amazing and personal in ways I will keep elaborating on in weeks to come, and we’d all been planning for it since before they were even engaged … but at that critical moment? The clouds parted, revealing the Worst Light Ever.
It was the sort of glorious spring sunshine through trees and windowpanes that might seem cheerful if a bit blinding to a layperson, but to a photographer? Well, right after the ceremony, an avid photographer guest asked “how the heck did you shoot in that?”
Answer: I didn’t.
The speed and simplicity of a first kiss removes a lot of choices, but you are still left with things like how close to be, which lens to use, what is your framing … but the most defining one is “which side will you shoot?”
In a vacuum, I would love to always try to photograph a first kiss from the back for a simple reason … it means that the background to the shot are the people that the couple loved enough to invite to their wedding.
But each decision is made in context. Shooting from behind is risky because you never quite know if people will get in front of your camera, and in many scenarios both getting and being there can feel very obtrusive. Moreover, even when it is the best position for that moment, it definitely puts you way out of position for all of the amazing moments that can happen right afterward, from first joyful glances to the recession.
This is why it is so fantastic to be a two-person team who trust each other completely. In those few seconds, we know that either of us can get the better angle for the first kiss and the other can piece their ways through the latticework of shadows to capture all the first post-ceremony moments. Partnership allows you to both cover your bases and take necessary risks at the same time.
(more tech info and the ”bad light” photo at patreon.com/thebrenizers)
Ramsey Golf Club mother-son dance /
When taking, choosing, and editing photos, there is usually some sort of battle between the photographer in us and the human in us … and at least in weddings the human should often in the battles.
This isn’t even the cleanest composition that we took in that one-minute period … but it’s the one that makes me tear up as I look at it, and we think that is more important.
One of the clearest surprises when we looked through our own wedding photos was that things we might have thought of as clutter when looking at someone else’s photos were extremely interesting and important when we knew all the people. To you, the people on the left are blobs — to the bride, they are some of the most important people in her life.
But it’s Mom’s expression that gets me, and speaks to another lesson in empathy we’ve had in recent years.
Parenthood? Woah.
Being a Dad is about as hard as I thought being a Mom would be. And motherhood is a physical and emotional endurance course like nothing I’ve ever seen.
Weddings are important enough to hire a photographer for not just because you dress nice and bought flowers, but because of the lifetimes of relationships they represent, before and after the day. I don’t know what it was like to raise and care and know Matthew the way a Mom would … but for a split-second I get a glimpse.
Sacred Oaks at Camp Lucy wedding photo /
From an Austin wedding — everyone is more flexible in Texas?
Patreon stuff below: Feel free to read or feel free to ignore and just enjoy this awesome image from Tatiana!
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In 2014 I developed a lecture on how to stay profitable and happy as a self-directed photographer and businessperson*. I have learned since that the advice was really good, partially because multiple people told me how much it helped them, and partially because it helped *me* every time I followed my own advice, but mostly because every time I *didn’t* take this advice I became less happy in my business and less productive. A/B testing the hard way, if you will.
When I finished all my notes and the development process, I had a really good, complete, six-hour lecture. For a 90-minute speaking slot. I know all too well what Mark Twain meant when he said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one.”
I managed to whittle it down, but there’s a lot left to say. Over coming months, I will not only be dispersing each piece of advice from this lecture extended into article form; I will be adding whatever was left on the cutting room floor that shouldn’t have been, and the lessons I’ve learned since then: Both from the times I followed this advice and from the times I didn’t.
Part of what we do is take pictures … but actually clicking the shutter is the small part. Getting and staying motivated to do each part of the job is what keeps us going and truly makes us better. We will be taking that journey over at our Patreon, and are excited to have people take it with us.
(Also our resident Patreon guru Sam Hurd tells us that we should raise our prices on the premium tier, so we might not be at $5/month much past March! Get it while it’s hot, and you can totally blame Sam if you don’t make it in time for the deadline).
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D3s, Sigma 24mm f/1.4 ART @ f/2. 1/250th, ISO 1000
Park Chateau wedding first look /
Man we love a tearful first look … we’ve been tempted to add onions to our gear bag. But no vegetables were needed for Mary and Vin; the emotion was palpable the entire day.
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#sonya7III, #sony85mmgm @ f/1.4 1/125th, ISO 800
New York Botanic Garden wedding panorama /
Recipe for true depth-of-field craziness.
1) Take a photo at f/0.95.
2) Take 95 more photos (or fewer; it’s easy to overdo it for safety with the Sony A9.)
3) #brenizermethod
Metropolitan Building wedding photo /
There’s so much in this moment at Hans and Scott’s Tea ceremony… and so much more to come.
Prospect Park Boathouse wedding photo /
Love is being able to forget the world with each other on a warm summer night.
True love, like Noelle and Francis's, is being able to forget the world on a freaking freezing winter night like this.
Prospect Park Boathouse wedding photo /
A9, 85mm @ f/1.4, 1/200th, ISO 2000
When is a moment more than a moment? When it represents decades into the past and future.
Every time we photograph the little moments that might seem familiar, we keep in mind everything that has led to it. The hug of a father-daughter dance — or many similar moments — is a spark of deep emotion, but also represents all of the time these people imagined it, and all of the time they spent forming their connection.
We are already blown away by the idea that Gavin will be married one day, that we’ll be celebrating his own love story. We are living those moments in different but equally vivid ways as we will when we look back on it later, perusing the photos. Each of these perspectives can infuse so many of the smallest moments of wedding days, one of the many things that keeps them more fresh and exciting for us than ever.