Wedding Confidential

This post comes at a really appropriate time.  It's almost as if the cosmos had aligned Jill and David's wedding with my mood.  This year also marks a certain anniversary that I'm sure goes unnoticed to most both inside and outside the food loving community.  It happens to be the 10 year anniversary of chef, world traveler and food author Anthony Bourdain's ground breaking book Kitchen Confidential,  which gave readers an unprecedented view into what goes on behind the scenes in New York restaurants.  Why does all this matter?  You see Jill and David are both avid food and wine enthusiasts. 

So in celebrating the wedding of two foodies and with Anthony Bourdain in mind, I'm going to give readers a peek into the behind the scenes world of weddings.  Will this raise a few eyebrows? Probably.  But the more couples know, the better clients they are.  Welcome to Wedding Confidential.

Jill's day started with great weather but unfortunately the hairstylist didn't do a good job on her hair.  In fact, I could tell it was going to be something that would bother Jill.  As a photographer, this is worrisome.  If a bride can't relax, it shows in the photos.  She's not interacting the same way, smiling or moving as if she was loving how she looked. 

Luckily, Marcia Hemphill from An Urban Affair  http://www.anurbanaffair.com/ was the wedding planner that day.  Marcia and I have worked together for years.  She hires and works with the best.  Immediately, she is on the phone with hair dressers all over the city to see who is close and available to fix this.  This is why you hire a wedding planner.  If all a planner is doing is keeping the couple on schedule, they can just as easily ask a friend.  A great wedding planner has great contacts.  The best wedding planners make sure all the other vendors are taken care of and have what they need to make an amazing event.  They facilitate but never get in the way.

Invariably the best wedding planners come from backgrounds in hospitality, catering, event planning, concert productions and even consulting.  These are not the people who loved planning their own wedding and now feel qualified to be a wedding planner; there are too many of those.  Sure it may have started that way, but these people have a deep background in organization.  They work with people because they pick the best for their clients not because the vendors pay a kick-back or referral fee to the planner as some require, which is a little known secret in the industry.

Phillip at Parto Naderi http://www.partonaderi.com/ saved the day.  He did Jill's hair as fast, beautifully and professionally as I've seen anyone ever work.  Phillip and I have worked together before at another wedding.  Phillip does great hair.  I don't believe in "wedding hair", I think that's a term for a bad updo.  I think it should just be great hair that is for a wedding.  Wedding hair is in those bad hair magazines, an overly stiff and curled updo.  Great hair can be up or down and works with the bride's style and you see inspirations of it in InStyle, Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire.  Someone who can do great wedding hair is someone who just does great hair.

The rest of the day went as smoothly as anyone could hope for.  The priest at Holy Name Cathedral was charming, gracious and worked with Jill, David and I to make sure we were able to make some fantastic ceremony photos.  With Holy Name's status in the community, they could easily be overly strict and frankly prohibitive to work in as some churches are.  The ceremony could take place in a historic church but the photographer may be restricted to a seat in the back, unable to move for the whole duration.  Or my favorite, one church even requires you hire one of their "approved" photography studios for the ceremony.  Apparently, the mass of weekend photographers the studios hire is somehow trained and certified to be respectful and take photos.  Really?!? Or is it that there is some other reason. But Holy Name Cathedral has never gone to these lengths and thus remains a favorite church of photographers all over Chicago.

Thanks to great planning there was enough time to go to some of David and Jill's favorite locations and take all the photos we wanted.  I love that time of the day.  It's when the couple can just relax and enjoy time together.  I prefer to just sit back and follow them with my camera.  Watching for interaction and those little moments that can easily go unnoticed but say so much.  They hired a Dusenburg convertible to take them around.  I loved the vintage feel of the car and the classic style of Jill and David.  I knew the photos would turn out with that vintage feel.  Yet, there was no way I was going to Photoshop it to look faux vintage.

Every decade seems to have its own wedding photography look.  I've always found this curious considering weddings are timeless affairs.  In the 70's people were peering around trees or floating in brandy snifters or above the alter.  In the 80's everyone looked all soft and foggy and the poses were contrived and overly stiff.  In the 90's everyone was carrying each other; grooms being carried by the bridesmaids and vice versa.  Then with the movie Resevoir Dogs, guys were walking with sunglasses in every alley in the city.  In the early 2000's with Photoshop being accessible to the masses, skin became plastic and featureless; if perfection is great I guess more perfection is even better.  Along with that everyone started jumping off things and fake cheering and fake dipping.  Now the current trend seems to be faux vintage. 

Photographers en masse purchasing the latest special effects created by other "celebrity" wedding photographers.  It's difficult to color correct and work on thousands of images from a wedding and get them to the client on time.  I'll admit, during the midst of the summer, I'm often a week late, but I think it's worth it to get it right.  My pet peeve is black tuxes that somehow look blue in photographs.

My feeling is that vintage should be real like a wedding.  It should come from years of the photo being displayed and stories that develop around it as it's passed around at family gatherings.  Your children should laugh at what you wore and your hairstyle and how you danced.

In the end whether your hair looked perfect or where you had your wedding or even who photographed your wedding means less than the memories that you'll take away and the life that you'll build as a couple.  Memories and stories, over time take on a life of their own and change and get rewritten as our memories fade with age and what was important 10 years ago seem less important now and are replaced with even more important things.

So to Jill and David, your love of food, wine and adventure does inspire and has even inspired this, my longest blog post ever.  Thank you for sharing your class, style, ease, humor and spirit which once again has shown me why I love what I do and what the important things are.

The slideshow can be seen at www.dennisleeslideshows.com/jillanddavid