A Very Happy 81st!

 We got commissioned to party and shoot Ama's 81st birthday! All the sons, daughter, cousins, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and best friends came to celebrate Ama's birthday. Ama was running around greeting everybody and dancing until the wee hours of the night, and everyone was drinking and having fun. There were tons of food, and the grandchildren formed a choir and sang together. There were about 250 people who attended the party, and both Steve and I shot this. 

I don't believe you have to have tons of assistants to shoot an event, because in the end, you want a little bit more than enough pictures to choose from, instead of thousands upon thousands of pictures to choose from. In total we shot a little less than 800 frames, and printed about 50+ pictures into an A3 album. There were some repetitions and some pictures that didn't make it of course, so the CD containing the photos ended up containing about 200ish pics. As long as you have good quality pics, you're good. We were very lucky because it was a very lively party and people were genuinely happy to get their pics taken even with a flash in their faces. Steve had a Canon 5DmarkII with a 70-200mm lens and I had a D800 with a 24-70mm lens. So I was the one who had to do the wide shots, and group shots. It was a bit scary not to have back-up, but this is one of those things where practice makes perfect. I've been lucky enough to be doing events for quite a while now, so I'm used to my gear and the flash settings. And you have to be super fast and super alert to get the candid moments. I don't think Steve used a flash even, so he had more of a natural feel to his photographs, which gave a very nice picture overall. I wish you could see the album (reminder to self: take picture of album before sending to client XD), it turned out really nicely :D.


-grace