Johannesburg Wedding Photographer – Ben Viljoen – Pretoria Weddings, Potchefstroom Weddings, Freestate Weddings, Limpopo Weddings, Johannesburg Weddings » Wedding Photography in Johannesburg, South Africa

Why yes of course there is a wedding ceremony going on behind me that I’m getting paid for.

Below is a slideshow of images that I personally enjoy from Mwende and Emeka’s wedding vow renewal ceremony in Mauritius. It does lack a few pics to complete the story, but it’s late and I have a ton of other work to catch up on.

BTW, as a side note for photographers, especially new ones looking at buying a suitable kit for weddings. I am simply amazed sometimes at the amount of equipment that supposedly “must be had” if you want to shoot a wedding.  A typical list may look as follows…

• must have 2/3/4/5 cameras
• must have a 24-70mm f/2.8L lens
• must have a 70-200mm f/2.8L lens
• must have a flash (or 4)
• must have remote triggers for the 4 flashes…with light stands of course
• must have a tripod
• must have a reflector
• must have a gazzilion batteries
• must have XXX bag
• must have an assistant

All the images in this slideshow, with the exception of the first one (which Cindy took) was captured with a 5D MkII and a 50mm f/1.4 lens…nothing else. Now I’ll admit, I sometimes craved a wider angle lens, but I didn’t NEED it. My kit for the rest of this year is also exactly the same, except that I added a 28mm f/1.8 to my arsenal.

If you have difficulty viewing the slideshow, please click HERE to be redirected to the direct URL.

Enjoy

I got some film back from the lab yesterday. We took a cheap film camera with an underwater housing along to Mauritius, mainly to photograph fish and stuff while snorkeling…that’s until we had the cool idea of photographing the boys underwater in the swimming pool instead.  I burned about three frames when I realised that the underwater housing is leaking and the mission was aborted.

Got in one or two sweet shots though, of which this one is my favourite…

I suspect it’s about time to blog something about the Edozie celebration of December.

In a nutshell, here is what happened. Boy meets girl, girl marries boy, boy and girl lives happily together for 10 years, boy and girl decides to celebrate their love and blessings with their closest friends and family in paradise on some exotic island in the Indian ocean.

Another boy and girl gets to tag along and document the whole party on camera…awesome!

Day 1: Santa came, too much food (and at times drinks) were consumed, and a swimming pool was thoroughly churned up.

Simon says, “Whitney Houston”

I’ll admit that getting into the pool with my new 5D without an underwater housing may not have been the sanest thing to do, especially with kids around…but then, I got some cool pics.

Day 1 of 3 toasted with dancing, champagne and a sunset boat cruise over the crystal clear Mauritius ocean.

This moment sums up the weekend for me

We are back from Mauritius!

Right now I’m just busy backing up the thousands of pictures, sifting through some mail and checking once in a while to see if Cindy is managing Ok with the tons of washing. I cannot wait to sit down and actually browse through the images.

Here is one of the last ones I took the evening before we left. I really thought that I would be able to do the bright blue water, saturated beachy images, like the ones you see in the travel catalogs, but apparently I just cannot see images that way. I will try again with the wedding pics. For now though, just a rather dramatic portrait of a boat .

We stayed on the other side of those cliffs (le Morne), in the town of la Gaulette. Ropsen provided some excellent accommodation for us. I would highly recommend him if you want to go self catering on a budget.