"Happily Ever After"

"Happily Ever After"
© David A. Ziser

Here is one of the last image I captured at the beautiful wedding I photographed in Phoenix a few weeks ago. Actually my clients are coming by tomorrow to review their images.  I love this image and always love the opportunity to take it when ever we have sparklers on hand for the photograph.

The challenge, as always, is to be sure to have your ISO sufficiently high so that the sparklers will record properly.  I was shooting a pretty high ISO for this image.

Lighting–wise I had a few options.  The first was to light them with both off camera flash coming in from camera left or right.  I opted out of that idea because the people in the background would have gone too dark.

Instead, I decided to backlight them having my assistant, LaDawn hide behind the couple as I fired her flash remotely.  The goal was to have the couple perfectly rimmed out with the light. 

Well, like they say, the best laid plans sometimes take a wrong turn.  The couple was moving so fast, LaDawn could not hold her hidden position behind them.  That resulted in me photographing the flash she was holding.  She is still well disguised by the bright flash – what to do?  How about I just disguise my blast of flash as smoke wafting through the scene from the sparklers?  That’s exactly what I needed to do in Photoshop.  Hey, all's well that ends well, and this image was a perfect end to a wonderful wedding!

Camera specs:  Canon 7D fitted with 18-200mm IS lens at 18mm, F5.6 @ 1/50 second, ISO 1600.  Enjoy!  -David

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Hey gang, I’m keeping it short and sweet today and leaving you with this image for the weekend.  I’m looking forward to seeing Bev and Jon this weekend and presenting their images to them.  It was a great wedding a few weeks ago and it will be fun to hear about their honeymoon adventure and to relive their special wedding day celebration.

Have a great weekend and I’ll see you on Monday, David