Weddings Southern Style, Joy and Dan

June 17, 2006

Wedding : First Baptist Church, Marietta Georgia

Reception: The Atlanta Country Club, Atlanta Georgia.

So, say you are a wedding photographer. And you by chance have ONE Saturday off in 5 months. What would you do? Well, if you are me, you fly to Atlanta to shoot a wedding. Am I nuts? Actually, it was a great experience. I was a second shooter for my friend Emmanuel Neiconi from Neiconi Studios in Birmingham, Alabama. He was in a bind and needed a second shooter and posted on a professional internet forum I am on for wedding photographers. So I grabbed the kids and hopped a plane to the deep south. My mom and sister live in Atlanta, so we turned it into a mini-vacation!

Second shooting is a blast. All of the fun, none of the pressure. It’s the best way to learn and grow as a photographer. Every time I have done it, I have learned something new from the people I shoot with. And shooting weddings out of Wisconsin is always interesting because they have very different customs than we do. In the south, weddings are generally either early in the day followed by a luncheon, or later in the day followed by a more informal dinner. The wedding I photographed started at 7pm! I kept saying, “But when is dinner?!” Almost all of the formal photographs were done before the ceremony The bride and her family and bridesmaids first, then she was squirreled away and the groom and his family and groomsmen. Endless, endless amounts of formals…ugh. I was glad it wasn’t me doing them! It’s a bit more traditional in that area in that way. Then the ceremony, which was about, oh…6 minutes long! More formals, then off to the reception where they had food stations set up for the guest. The guests go to the reception and start eating, and when the bride and groom get there, they are “announced” in and go directly to their first dance. After that, the cut the cake, and then the grooms cake, another southern tradition. I made a perfect fool of myself when I remarked to the groom that he got the colors wrong on his groom’s cake. You see, it was in the shape of a dog bone and had a big “G” on it that looked just like the Packer logo. But it was black and red. Apparently that is also the logo for the Georgia Bulldogs, his alma matter. Whoopsie. I needed to remove my cheesehead blinders. And to make me pay, he made me “Woof” during the song “Who let the dogs out” at the reception.

The reception lasts about 3 hours and at 11PM the bride and groom make their “Grand Exit”. Huh? No partying until midnight? No chicken dance? No polkas? Nope. They leave in a rush of flower petals and streamers, sometimes sparklers thrown by all the guests and get into a limo and they are off.

A few other things I learned while in Atlanta. Just because a word has a “g” in it does not mean you need to pronounce it. I learned that I was not “Going to shoot a wedding” I was “Fixin’ to shoot a weddin’” My name has two syllables! “Key-um”. And when one nice guest asked me where “my people” were from I had no idea how to answer. For future reference, my people are from Wisconsin. All the little kids called me “Miss Key-um” and answered all my questions with “yes m’am” something I found charming and tried to make mandatory for my own kids. It didn’t stick.

Enjoy lookin’ at the pitchers, and slideshow y’all!