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This is the wedding of Shanti DiSalvio. It took place on her family's spacious and picturesque property in Homer, Michigan, in June of 2002. I had photographed her sister's wedding a year earlier on the same property (see some of them on the opening Wedding Gallery page).
On Shanti's wedding day, it was hot and hazy with very little shade. These are not good conditions for photographs of people: direct, unfiltered overhead sun causes dark shadows in the eyes, and makes noses look huge. White wedding dresses lose all detail as the sun causes them to wash out. Very unflattering. . However, Shanti, her wedding party, and guests were not to be impeded, and I got some great images.
I post this wedding to show you that a real pro can get good images under tough conditions if s/he knows what they are doing. They may not be fine art, but they will be loved by the bride and groom and their families ... as these were. I also am posting the ENTIRE wedding. This is something you rarely see in a photographer's studio, and NEVER see on the web. Why? Most photographers can get one or two good images out of the one or two hundred they take at a wedding, but on the whole the images are mediocre.
But you are investing in the whole wedding, right? So isn't it reassuring if all the images are good?
I have posted only the color images here. The black and white photojournalistic images that Angie took do not appear. They were made on black and white film, and I was too lazy to scan another 80 images. The groom especially had quite a few more images in black and white.
I apologize that the images do not appear in storybook timeline fashion, as these images were renumbered by the lab's software (it has been corrected since). An added note: these are the RAW images. Unretouched. No Photoshop manipulation. No chairs taken out, no trash removed from the backgrounds, no people replaced or dropped in, no heads switched. In other words, the images as they were, right from the camera. While I do use Photoshop to enhance images, I use it sparingly. A good file makes a good print.
I hope you enjoy Shanti's Wedding as much as I enjoyed creating the memories.
Please take note that from time to time, I get people that tell me, “The pictures are not very sharp.” The images ARE sharp. There are a couple of variables that determine how sharp they appear on your monitor:
1. Compression. To make the images load in a reasonable amount of time for people on dial-up modem connections, I have to trade image quality for speed. I could forgo compressing the images, but I would have to make the images smaller so they would load faster. Compression makes the images not quite as sharp, but they load faster.
2. Your monitor. Respectfully, if you're using an $89 monitor & $19 video card, nobody's images are going to look good on your computer. This was painfully evident when I photographed a magazine cover featuring a local collector. I posted them on my web site for her to see. She complained mightily that I did a TERRIBLE job, because the images were so blurry she couldn't identify who was in the images! I told her they were very sharp on my monitor. Of course, I'm using a high-end LaCie monitor and video card. She called to apologize when the magazine came out and the image on the cover was tack sharp.
