Results tagged “wedding”

This is where my wife Air and are spending the weekend. This evening we're off to the Grotto Spa. A huge thank-you to my cousin Tarya and her husband T.J. for sending us on this jaunt across the Salish Sea, as a thank-you gift for taking photos at their wedding a few weeks ago.

I don't believe in karma, but sometimes what goes around does come around.

P.S. Portions at the resort restaurant are ridiculously large. I might have been able to finish my delicious steak last night if I hadn't ordered what turned out to be a huge (and also delicious) Caesar salad first. You've been warned.

Speaking of wedding photos, here they are:

I think Tim Bray is right about what makes the new generation of tablet computers, led by the iPad from Apple, actually useful:

A tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the café, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone's eyes.

Here's how that played out for me this week, somewhat unexpectedly. I was the official photographer for my cousin's wedding last weekend. That morning, I was preparing myself to take hundreds of pictures with both my film and digital SLR cameras. But, having just picked up the digital camera kit for my iPad earlier in the week, I thought it might be useful to bring the iPad along as a quick backup device onto which I could dump the digital files from time to time during the day. (Sometimes I'm a little paranoid about backups.)

After the ceremony itself, as everyone was settled in for the buffet brunch, but before speeches began, I plugged in the adapter and my camera's SD card and got most of the photos imported onto the iPad. (The process was a little flaky: after the first few hundred, the Photos app kept quitting, and though it remembered what it had imported, it would only do a few more pictures at a time before crashing again.) I didn't get everything backed up right then, but it was enough, especially since pictures of the ceremony itself were safe.

Then, as I flipped through the photographs to check them out, I realized something: I could pass the iPad around. My cousin and her family and friends could see pictures of the wedding, in a beautiful large picture-frame style that was easy and intuitive to flick through, before the event was even half over. They loved it.

Later that evening, I'd had a chance to get home, change clothes, and import the rest of the pictures before heading over to my aunt and uncle's house for the wedding after-party. There, more people, including the groom and his mom (who was visiting from Toronto), were able to see all the pictures on the iPad, the same day I'd taken them. A few of the group portraits included the groom's extended family—who, it turns out, had never all been in a photo together before, ever. He and his mom both got teary-eyed looking at them.

A few months ago I might have brought my laptop to import photos onto during the wedding. More likely, I wouldn't have bothered. And I certainly wouldn't have passed it around, since it's more awkward, fragile, and complicated to use when viewing pictures—particularly standing around in a crowded room of people who've had a few drinks.

I'm in the process of putting the best pictures from the wedding online, and I'll give everything to my cousin and her husband on DVD too, but the immediacy and poignancy of being able to display the pictures right there, during the events of the wedding day, made the iPad well worth what my wife paid for it in June.

These two handsome folks got married today after ten years together:

Tarya, the one on the right, is my cousin—some of you may spot our resemblance, though she's much prettier than me. Her husband TJ is on the left. The picture is by my lovely wife Air. Since I was the official photographer at the wedding, I have a ton of other photos (more than 700!), but they need a bit of prep before I put some online.

It was a remarkable day, and I managed to avoid crying all over my cameras. Just barely.

Since our local Save-On-Foods outlet shut down its photo lab last year, I've been taking my rolls of film to the Costco down the hill, which will process them, make prints, and scan at high resolution to CD for a very reasonable price (about $9 Cdn per roll, taxes included). They do a great job in an hour or so, giving me the benefits of both film and digital photography.

Alas, they are now scheduled to stop handling 35 mm film in mid-September too. There's just not enough demand. (Apparently, they are the only Costco outlet in Western Canada still processing photo film.) So after that, I'll have to pay a higher price at one of the photo specialty stores in the area. Good thing Costco is still doing the work right now, though: I'm taking both digital and film photos of my cousin's wedding tomorrow, so I'll have a big batch of pictures to run through the service next week.

It's a pity. Film photography is not going away, and people seem to like when I use it, but the days of truly cheap developing may be over.

I've been to a lot of weddings. A lot. Dozens and dozens, mostly those of people I don't know. Playing in a band that performs at weddings gives you plenty of exposure to a variety of marriage ceremonies, plus associated parties and receptions.

While there are only a few things required to get legally married—a license, a recognized officiant, certain declarations, signatures from the bride and groom (or brides or grooms here in Canada now), witnesses—there are of course many traditions, some religious, some derived from religions, some secular. What I remember about any particular wedding are the ways, small and large, that it differs from a "stock" wedding.

Our friend Tanya married Barry yesterday here in Vancouver, before they both move to Calgary. Air and I were pleased to be invited. Here are some pictures I took:

What was different about this one? If you take the full-on traditional Canadian wedding as a template, then first of all, it wasn't in a church and there was a marriage commissioner rather than a minister or priest. And it was on a boat. But none of those is unusual in Vancouver.

(Incidentally, by total coincidence, the commissioner was a retired former teaching colleague of my wife's, whom the two of us also bumped into, in San Luis Obispo back in 1995, during our own honeymoon.)

Let's see. The groom was in a tuxedo, and the bride did wear a big flowy dress, but he wore a necktie rather than a bow tie, and her gown was a spectacular black and silver-grey. They didn't have a big wedding cake to cut, or to smush into each other's faces. They dispensed with the garter-and-bouquet bit.

Oh, and it was video-streamed live on the Internet, as well as live-blogged. There was an official tag for Flickr, Twitter, and so on: netchickweds.

If you know Tanya, none of that should be a surprise. She's called "Netchick" for a reason: she started blogging earlier than anyone else in Vancouver, back in 1997 (!), three years before me. She's on the first page of results when you Search for "Tanya" on Google. She's as plugged-in as can be, and Barry (no slouch online himself) seems fine with that.

Looking around the dinner seating on the boat, I realized that being online is definitely not a nerds-only thing anymore. It's what people do, for trivial things like our latest lunches, or important things like our weddings. And I think it's good.

My former co-worker Chris got married to Kerry recently, and they're posting travel photos from their camper-van U.S. honeymoon, which have been great fun to follow. What I especially like is that their wedding presents included sponsorships of various parts of their journey, and they include thank-you printouts in many of the pictures, like this and this.

It's all just terribly charming. I've traveled a lot in the western U.S.A. over the years, especially Oregon and California, so their photos bring back many fond memories. Oddly, I've never visited Yosemite National Park. Maybe someday, if my health improves. Maybe.