Unofficial Photographer

As inexplicably requested by the bride and also by her father, both shown above at the beginning of the doing of the decisive deed, I attended H.'s wedding a few days ago.

The bride was gorgeous and glowing, the groom somewhat less so, and it was held in a beautiful setting on a day when the weather found nothing to grumble about till much later, in the evening, and everyone had a great time, and everything came out as well as anyone could have expected.

I should say right here, though, that I have never understood the appeal of big weddings, because I don't see how they can have any relationship to what I would think would be the uppermost consideration of the whole day, and that is the ultimate success of the ensuing marriage. But that can never be the purpose, can it, because who knows what the future holds? But if that is not the purpose of such a large and costly event, then what is? To serve as an excuse for a great party, and things like the reunion of farflung relatives?

Therefore, purely from my jaundiced and completely unacceptable point of view, I decided that this wedding could at least serve one good purpose, and that was to push me to learn more about my remarkable little Canon digital camera, which is not that little compared to the baubles that most people usually bring out and have the nerve to call them "cameras" but which are indecently not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. and besides come in all sorts of gaudy "decorator" colors instead of the black of the model I have, the same color that Henry Ford demanded on all his Model T's, and the color also of all the single lens reflexes that served me so well in the past.

I bought this Canon three years ago, yet I had not gotten a good handle on most of its features that are too numerous to count, as are the number of buttons, doors, and other things on every square centimeter of the camera except on the lens.  I spent some time beforehand putting in fresh batteries and studying especially how to use the flash and the movie functions, and thus armed, I went forth and never sat during the ceremony.

Instead I kept slowly circling the whole assemblage, just as I did in the old days, when, back in the late 60's and the !970's, among other subjects I thoroughly shot up every demonstration that came through D.C., and there were a lot of them, and more meaningful ones than you get now, if nobody minds me saying so.

It was a strange experience because meanwhile I didn't sense the presence of an official wedding photographer. Instead, afterward, a couple of people kidded me by saying that they thought I might have been the official photographer, because, except for one lady, I was the only one who moved around shooting from a variety of angles.

And I guess that for various reasons I was also not the invisible man that I had been in previous days, and in fact later the bride's father, my chessplaying friend, and the main one who several times had tried to persuade me to come, said, maybe jokingly but maybe not, that during the ceremony, he had been tempted to shout out to me, "GET OUTTA THERE!" And he was only restrained by the thought that his daughter, a very strong-willed young lady I am told, who made many of the arrangements for this wedding herself, due to the unfortunate incapacity of her mother, would not have appreciated his little outburst one little bit.

I can't guarantee how sharp the photos that I took are, due to the condition of my eyes. Also I wish I had been more aware of what my Canon 5S-1s can do in the movie-making area. I tried that function a couple of times but, not knowing how much my 4-gig memory card would hold, I only got sequences lasting for a few  seconds each. Later I realized that I could have shot much longer bits, and also, because my camera also records sound, I could have picked up much more of what the participants were saying, because the sound came out clear and loud, with the birds also having their melodious say.

Well, maybe there will be a next time when I can put what I learned to better use.

But I think I still got a number of good shots, including some that I don't think many others got. It turned out that instead of having an official photographer, the groom, a man from Germany, handed out a half dozen cameras to his friends to record the event. But most of them were in the ceremony itself, and I noticed very few camera-toting people on their feet and moving around like I was and as, in my opinion, any real photographer would have done, instead of just sitting there like stones.

Without the testimony of the pictures, sooner or later any good spectacle soon goes to waste.