Is it a job if I don't get paid?

It's really, really late, but I can't help but share a few photos from the wedding I shot last weekend.

I flew out to San Francisco (Oakland, actually) to shoot my friends' wedding. I graduated from photo school (Bachelors of Fine Arts) with David, and he has been dating his girl, Katie, as long as I've known him. He just finished grad school (MFA) from the San Francisco Art Institute (an incredible school with a top-rated photo program) and they got married September 6.

For some reason, of all the photogs he knows, he and Katie asked me to shoot the event. When he called 6 months ago, I thought I might get to hand out programs or arrange flowers, but he asked me to be the photographer, because he and Katie "like my style" and I am "responsible." Needless to say I was incredibly flattered, and terrified. David and I were the two who stayed at the lab until they made us leave and he was even worse than I about nitpicking about little color variations in our prints. I've been agonizing about this whole thing for a while. Well, maybe not agonizing. I mean, I still procrastinated the actual planning of the thing, not borrowing books from the library about flash photography until the week of, but still, I thought about the wedding a lot. And David tried to reassure me that whatever I did would be fine, and much appreciated. But it didn't cover up the fact that in a theatrical "aside" David muttered under his breath that when it was all over, he'd still "critique the heck out of the pictures."

I did it, it's over. I planned for it, making a detailed outline of the schedule with little sketches of ideas for compositions. I went to the site of the garden wedding the day before at exactly the same time of day to measure light and scope possible locations for the formal portraits. There were some difficulties- the light was really spotty coming through the trees during the ceremony. The bride's face was lit up most of the time with a horrendous highlight that looks like a big orange splotch. I tried to wash it out with my flash, but it just wasn't strong enough. Oh well. And I missed a couple of things at the reception b/c I'd forgotten to change my flash batteries and though the flash was dead, I kept on shooting. So the first dance pics are all pretty blurry. But it's over. Now for the editting.

Above are a few of the first ones I've gotten through. It's taking me forever to edit all of the pics. I need some batch-editing software. It exists, I've learned, which is exciting. Guess my want-list for Christmas just got bumped. Photoshop is great, but I long to be standing over a smelly tray of chemicals, methodically swishing them over my print, then blinking, carry my tray into the light for a first glimpse. Instead I sit on my rear, eating rice cakes or whatever not-chocolate the mean matron-of-the-house bought as "snacks" and watching A&E's Pride and Prejudice.