'upstairs/downstairs. ' scarborough, ontario.

Had a wonderful day with Andrea and Ovi yesterday, an amazing couple and an awesome wedding (Romanians sure know how to party!). While starting to go through the photographs this afternoon, I thought about how I am such a big fan of the early part of the wedding day, as the couple gets ready, because I love photographing rituals... they are such meaningful events imbued with powerful legacies and practices yet every time have their own unique characteristics and forms. It was great, then, that yesterday we had Andrea and Ovi getting ready in the same house. So, with that in mind, here are two photographs bringing together the Upstairs and Downstairs.

Upstairs:

Downstairs:

'chopping block: decapi-fish-tation'. tokyo fish market (Tsukiji), tokyo, japan.

As I sit here preparing for tomorrow's wedding shoot -- checking the two Canon 5D MKII bodies, cleaning lenses, formatting memory cards -- my mind has been drifting to Japan and how, only three weeks ago, I was wandering amongst the Tsukiji Market, the famed 'fish market' in Tokyo. "Hey, are you really going to show a fish-gutting photograph on a wedding photography website?" you might ask. Well, this is the blog page for my recent work both wedding and personal, and plus, I am a documentary photographer no matter what I am photographing, dedicated to photographically revealing the essence of all that which is around me (and other such rhetoric), bringing the craft of documentary photography to the world of weddings and offering brides and grooms a higher form of photography than the cheesy stereotypical wedding imaging, and if that means shaking things up a little then let's shake things up a little! Sound good? I thought so! As I was saying, the market is famed for its morning auction of massive tuna fish sitting frozen on the floor and eventually sliced up on bandsaws, etc., graphically shown in so many common photographs, but there is also so much more to the market than just that. If you step away from the action and walk the stalls off to the back, you'll find the people who actually slice and prepare so much of the fish that floods the city and ends up in, among other things, its world famous sushi. It is here that the work is actually done, the interaction, the preparation of what it is to become. To me, that is something really important, it is the heart of the entire thing. So, although I have a lot of photographs from which to choose, and will no doubt post some more later, for now I think I will go with a photograph whose power is in its subtlety and trueness to form (and photographically, the strong angles on the left hand side imbue a sense of immediacy, deftness, and precision which are its cornerstone). It is a photograph of labour, experience, and skill. And, in that, is the crux of it all.

'toffee the dog wants a flower'. high park, toronto.

...a new wedding season is upon us...

Flew in from Tokyo the other day as the wonders of a new wedding season is upon us again, with a lot of great couples coming up over the next months to document. Very awesome. But before the flurry starts I just wanted to share a few quick photographs from this past while, although there are many more photographs to sort through and present.

And, of course, I couldn't help but photograph my classic late-1950s Canon P Rangefinder on a Japanese Tatami mat. I brought plenty of rolls of film home that are waiting to be developed from the trip!

Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 06:27PM | Share Article