Wedding Showers

One of my best friends is getting married this April, to a nice fellow from the U.K. Today we threw her a wedding shower, and I got to "play" photographer, which was fun. It was nice to celebrate with her and show her our support and spend some special "girl time" with her. We also learned that they don't really do showers in England - it's a tradition started in the United States and now primarily practiced in the U.S. and Canada. I thought that was interesting.

But I digress - back to the the topic of photography. As I said, I got to "play" photographer at this shower. It was an interesting challenge - the closest I've ever come to doing wedding photography. I really enjoyed trying to capture the little details that went into putting on the shower - the place cards, the centerpieces, the card basket... What was much more difficult, though in it's own way enjoyable, was trying to get a photo of every single one of the guests. Some guests were reluctant to participate, but that was a pretty easy challenge to overcome ("But it's for the bride!"). What was tougher was to reconcile myself that the background was going to be busy, inevitably someone would close their eyes and NOT want me to continue snapping away until I got a good one, and that it was a party - people were circulating and it was easy to miss someone who'd just left their table. I managed to get shots of everyone - combining individual head shots with more candid group pictures, but I can definitely see why "table shots" never quite come out perfectly :-)

Of course, photographing the bride was easy - never hard to make someone who's smiling that much look good!

And now for the eye candy - a little piece of our day...