More Glamorous

Just a short post today, following my previous post about covering a Chinese banquet at Glamorous Chinese Restaurant in the Ancoat area of Manchester. I returned again today to cover another Chinese wedding banquet. Now traditionally a wedding banquet usually includes a chicken dish to signify the phoenix which is the mythical creature representing the female, and a prawn dish to signify the dragon – the mythical creature signifying the male.

While it’s quite the norm for the head table to be served the same dishes as the rest of the guest tables, restaurants do usually put in extra efforts on the presentation of the dishes for the head table. On today’s dish of Chinese style crispy fried whole chicken was a magnificant vegetable carving of a phoenix! Very appropriate in fact since the bride’s name is Phoenix.

So once again, I’m presently surprised by Glamorous Restaurant.

Just came back from another Chinese wedding banquet at The Glamorous Restaurant in Manchester, off Oldham Road. Glamorous has become quite a popular destination for Chinese wedding banquets for the Chinese community in Greater Manchester, and it’s easy to see why. Combining good food, honest prices, enough room for around 400 guests and plenty of free parking, it’s no wonder it’s become so popular.

One aspect of wedding photography I enjoy the most has to be the chance to meet and work with all kinds of people, and every now and then, I’d come across a couple who are unfairly handsome and photogenic, such as the couple today. It was a real pleasure to photograph Ringo and Jo’s wedding banquet today. Jo as you can see, looks amazing in a glamorous Chinese style red dress.

Red, of course, is the colour of good luck in Chinese tradition, all brides will wear red in her wedding, guests will sign a guest sheet in red, and give gifts of money in red evelopes.

Whilst a traditional Chinese banquet is arguable not the most exciting event on the wedding day, as the name suggests, it’s all about food. Glorious food. Luckily Ringo and Jo were not too shy to inject some fun into the day with their posing ideas…

All in all, not a bad day of shooting for me…

Yours

Ray

Angles matter: one of my favourite from last year

Happy new year everyone! With Christmas holidays behind us, many couples planning a wedding would be looking to move up a gear to try to get their list of jobs ticked off. And photography is sadly quite often at the bottom of the priorities.

As a photographer, you won’t be surprised to hear that my advice is to book yourself a professional photographer rather than rely on your friends and relatives. I have in fact been repeating this same advice for some years now.

I have been watching a bit of TV this Christmas, and found myself strangely drawn towards the adverts. There were a lot of perfume ads on TV around this time of year, and most of them showed beautiful women. No no, that’s not why I’ve been drawn toward the ads… well not completely anyway. What drawn me to them was a realisation of how beautiful most of the camera work in the ads were. Most of that, I think, were down to great lighting, camera angles and well directed actors and models.

It is this “art direction” that I’ve found very rewarding as a wedding and portraits photographer. Anyone these days can take a half decent snapshot with a modern camera on full auto modes, my challenge is to add my understanding of lights, angles and directions to create images worth replacing the Ikea prints on the wall with.

So when you’re looking for your wedding photographer, ask yourself if you are happy settling for a snapper or would you rather search for that someone who will take the time to make you beautiful and treat you like a supermodel?

RHOTOGRAPHY is having a new webpage designed and it’s almost ready.  It is just going through some final testing before launch. The new layout is hopefully easier for you to navigate and find the info you need.

Coinciding with the new website will also be more regular Tips and Ideas posts in the blog. So even if you have already found a photographer, you are most welcomed to come and get some new ideas for your big day.

After all the hard work organising the wedding day it’s no wonder the busy bride to be is ready to let her hair down! That traditional ‘last night of freedom’ doesn’t have to mean parking issues or fighting for that last cab at the end of the evening.

Stretch limos may seem like all the rage with the kids, but for a more tasteful ride have you considered hiring a coach instead? You can fit more people in and have loads of room for party games inside, and most importantly,you won’t have to worry if the limo you hired has passed all the safty tests.

Let the fiendly guys at The Event Bus help you with your transport headaches, with room for 25, you won’t have to choose which friend can’t come because the car is full.

The Event Bus can be decorated to suit your hen night theme! Any extras you may require such as balloons, hen night dare cards and a few naughtier treats can be provided.

Of course the Event Bus, or indeed other coach services, are a great alternative for any events, especially with today’s extortionate cost to park. I once paid £14 to park my car for just over 4 hours for a wedding reception!

Don’t let transportations ruin your party, drop the fiendly guys at The Event Bus a line and see how they can help.

My slogan is because your memory is priceless, so what is memory?

“Memory is just your interpretation of what really happened” writes Michael Heppell in his book Flip It. That’s made me think about the way that one of the world’s most influential (and probably high earning) wedding photographer works.  Amongst the community of wedding photographers, Jerry Ghionis is arguably one of the most well known, his working style isn’t everybody’s taste, but his images are definitely some of the most stunning around.

A lot of Jerry’s images look like they are reportage, fly on the wall captures, being in the right place at the right time shots. But he’s the first person to people that most if not all his best loved images were in fact set up and carefully directed shots. Staged if you like, or posed to use a word that’s gone out of fashion these days.

His goal is usually to make those posed shots look like they were natural captures, which bring us back to the quote at the beginning of this post, that memory is an interpretation of what really happened. You see, Jerry is always telling people that he doesn’t wait around for things to happen, instead he likes to create the situation by asking people to do certain things at specific places. The result is a set of images where people may be genuinely interacting, but the situation would not have happened if it weren’t for the photographer asking them to interact there and then in that particular way.  The photos afterward show beautifully captured moments, the emotions would be genuine and everyone takes home some beautiful memories (and pictures) of the day.

You may gather from this post that I’m a big fan of Jerry. I am a member of his ICE Society, which is a web site he set up to inspire and educate photographers. I recently attended a full day seminar in London and came back thoroughly inspired. As a photographer in Stockport, I’m thousands of miles from Jerry’s home in Australia, but one thing is sure, that is I share his goal of wanting to create and capture the best memories for my couples. Whilst hiring Jerry may cost you the price of a nice new car, I try to be more down to earth, although I no longer cater for the budget end of the market, I believe everyone deserves to have their most precious memories captured professionally, so if you like what you see on the website, then I would love to hear from you and see what I can do for you.

I’m now on LinkedIn and my profile can be found at

http://www.linkedin.com/in/rhotography

Of course, this is in addition to my facebook page at

http://www.facebook.com/rhotography.page

Please visit me and leave a comment or two.