A Cultural Experience

On Saturday May 8th we got a chance to shoot our first wedding in Chicago.  The couple Viju and Asha also gave us our first opportunity to film an Indian wedding.  It was quite an experience of cultural traditions.  The wedding was at the Queen of All Saints Basillica and the reception was held at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare.  What a day.  It was really interesting learning about all the traditions from a blessing before the wedding to many presentations and cultural elements of the reception. 

It did get me thinking afterwards about how we in America celebrate our weddings.  America is such a diverse mix of cultures yet our weddings have few symbolic traditions that reinforce unity between families and the special thing marriage really is as it unites two people into one family.  I’ve been to Jewish weddings, Hispanic weddings and now and Indian wedding and those cultures seem to have tradtions that make the wedding day even more special than we Americans do.  It seems to me we have a ceremony and go party.  Is that all the tradition we can come up with?  Maybe we as Americans could take some lessons from other cultures and begin some symbolic gestures to reinforce the specialness of marriage……ok…enough of those thoughts. It was just something I was thinking about.

We did work hard Saturday but we had a fun and educational time as well.  There was a live feed from one of our cameras so all of the 600+ guests could more easily see all the traditions taking place.  It was quite a day.

Well we had something else interesting to roll out on Saturday for this wedding season as well.  Let me talk video industry technology here.  We have a new camera in our arsenal.  It’s a Canon 7D DSLR camera.  A DSLR is the still camera that has swappable lenses.  Every photographer has multiples.  Well we have one now too except ours is a little different than many.  It shoots amazing HD video.  It’s one of the first generation of hybrid camera that shoots video as well as it shoots photos.  The real lure to this camera for us is what the footage looks like compare to our other cameras.  Photographers are able to get those great shots with the blurred backgrounds and foregrounds.  Well to do that with our videocameras is lots of work and difficult to do.  The new 7D makes it much easier to create the look of a photo but with movement.  It is a very filmic look and adds a whole new dimension to what our final videos can look like.

I have added a few different kinds of lenses for the camera for different scenarios but I haven’t gone the route most photographers and even videographers are going.  I have learned recently about older retro lenses from years ago that work on the camera via an inexpensive adaptor.  The lenses are less expensive cause no one is using the old generation of film cameras.  What makes these lenses so cool is some of the optics from the old lenses have a distinctive and different look than todays ultra crisp digital lenses.  My favorite new lens is actually and old lens from Russia with a brand name of Helios.  It is a pretty amazing little lens.  The blurs in the background just have a different look.  I am adding a few more of these retro lenses to my collection as well hoping to give our footage a little more of a distinctive look that others using these same cameras.  Here are some frame grabs right from the video we shot on Saturday.  These are not photos but just stills pulled from the video.  You can see the difference between standard video and these shots.  Imagine these kinds of shots mixed in throughout your video.   We hope it gives your wedding movie more of the feeling of a real movie.  

I know I talked technology in this post but I wanted to show you some new looks that will be coming to our wedding movies this year.  As the year progresses we will be including more and more of the footage into our products.  We have a Same Day Edit in a few weeks that just may include lots of footage from the prep and for the first time ceremony footage.  More excitement to come.