This may well be the last shot I'll be posting from the wedding I shot recently: the bride and groom previewing a sequence of shots taken by Fabio.

At the wedding I shot recently the bride and groom provided a Polaroid camera with their guest book - which is a great way to remember the day - but I doubt they had this kind of shot in mind :-)

I guess I probably don't need to explain this one: taken towards the end of the wedding I shot in Milan a couple of weeks ago :-)

Most brides smile, but some smile more beautifully than others :)

Apparently, or so I was informed at the weekend in Milan, an Italian man's nose is proportional in size to another less immediately obvious part of his anatomy. Fortunately, I only shot the noses ;)

One of the things I like most about shooting a wedding is the variability - still-lifes, frenetic action shots, portraits, and a whole range of other stuff - but one of my favourite bits is the calm before the storm of the bride getting ready for the remainder of day. It's peaceful, generally quite relaxed, and a gentle way to start the day.

If I ever come across a 'weird wedding shot' competition I'll enter this image. Captions please :)

For most of the wedding that Fabio and I shot at the weekend we were tasked with providing an informal record of the day – no posing, no set shots, and no queues of bored and reluctant relatives – but we did have 30 minutes with the bride and groom. I haven't looked through all the shots yet but I suspect that this one will be my favourite.

This is the first of a few shots I'll be posting from the wedding I shot in Milan with Fabio Thian on Saturday. It was a long day – we were shooting from 9am until around 8pm – but it was a lot of fun.

This is a shot from Jess's and Georg's wedding that I photographed last weekend in Blackpool with Sheila. We had a fantastic day and got some great shots, of which this is probably my favourite: the bride and groom on Blackpool seafront.

This was take about a minute later than the shot I posted earlier this month, and as you can see, his attention was starting to wander by this point :)

On a related note ...

If you missed my previous post, I'm going to be running a new class with PPSOP: The Art of Black and White Photography. If you click the previous link you'll see that the course covers: black and white conversion techniques; working with portraits; combining conversion techniques and selectively altering tonal range and contrast; and toning and colorizing your black and white images – all of which are techniques that I used to create today's image. Specifically, I blended a Channel Mixer conversion with a Hue/Saturation adjustment (to even out the tonal balance for the image as a whole), added a few masked curves (to lighten his eyes and alter the global contrast), and then used a Curve to add a very slight warm tone to the highlights.

And while I'll be discussing all of these techniques in The Art of Black and White Photography>, I've also covered them in my own tutorials, specifically: Portraits: part one, Black and White: part one and part two, and Toning Colour Images.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.07pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/320 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 1x1

Here's another image from Jane and Nik's wedding that I shot back in October. My favourite shot from the one's I've posted is still this one (the rather serious looking Italian uncle), but I'm pleased with this one too.

In other news: if you'd be interested in some one-to-one training (either at our Blackpool office or at your own location in the UK) – on photography, post-production, or both – I now have some confirmed dates when I'll be back in the UK to provide training:

Thursday 10th February
Friday 11th February
Saturday 12th February
Sunday 13th February

Thursday 24th March
Friday 25th March
Saturday 26th March
Sunday 27th March

If you think you might be interested please email me [djn1 AT chromasia DOT com] or Libby [Libby AT chromasia DOT com] for further details.

And finally, don't forget that our 25% discount offer on our Photoshop tutorials ends at midnight on the 7th. Further info here:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.06pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/160 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

Here's another shot of the flower girl from the wedding I photographed in October. She was definitely cute :)

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

2.31pm on 8/10/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/5.6 1/250 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 200 no RAW Lightroom 3 Photoshop CS5 none no

I've just finished editing the images for the wedding I shot with Craig back in September, so thought I'd post one last image: Daniel and Catherine, the bride and groom.

There isn't much I can tell you about this one, other than that this wonderfully photogenic guy was one of the guests at the wedding I shot on Friday. Some people were born to be photographed :)

On some of my recent trips back to the UK I've had a couple of things to do, but have spent quite a lot of my time twiddling my thumbs or just wandering about taking photographs. This trip, however, is quite a lot busier: I got back on Wednesday, went clothes shopping on Thursday (which was hellish), photographed a wedding with Sheila Morris yesterday, and spent today delivering the first of two days 1-2-1 training. I've got Monday off, but have three morning training sessions next week, after which I fly back to BG with my good mate Craig.

As I'm sure you will have already worked out, this is the first of a number shots that I'll be posting from the wedding: the youngest of three flowergirls. She was definitely a cutey :)

I also have a couple more portraits that I'll be posting, and at least four shots from this morning's training session. I'll post the first of those on Monday.

This is the last of the shots I'll be posting from the wedding I shot recently with Craig: one of the cutest kids I've photographed in quite some time :)

Elsewhere ...

My recent interview with PhotoNetCast is now live:

.../photonetcast-52-talking-photography-with-david-nightingale.html

And I'm currently taking part in the inaugural game of HDR Tennis:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/HDR-Tennis/105060586224248

This is the penultimate image I'll be posting from the wedding I shot with Craig recently, and one of my favourites from the set. There are three reasons I like it.

First, it's a nice, happy shot: I love photographing people who are genuinely and unselfconsciously enjoying themselves.

Second, it was dead easy to post-process. Now, much as I like mucking around in Photoshop – I find the whole process very therapeutic – it's always rewarding to actually nail a wedding shot that requires very little work. In this case, just two adjustments: a black and white conversion using the Channel Mixer, then a single Curve for brightness and contrast.

If you're interested, the Channel Mixer conversion was biased towards the blue channel. This accentuated his facial details, and had the added bonus of lightening his jacket (both my black and white tutorials cover this technique. Further info here and here). All I then needed to do was brighten the image and add some contrast using a fairly strong S-curve, a topic I spend quite a lot of time discussing in my Tonal Range and the Curves Tool tutorial.

The third, and probably less obvious reason I like this one is that his camera looks implausibly small and fragile. Don't ask me why that's a good reason to like this image – I really have no idea why it appeals to me – but for me it's one of the elements that makes this shot.

As always, let me know what you think.

Oh, and Craig has also blogged a shot from the wedding today too. If you're interested, you can take a look here:

http://www.id7.co.uk/portfolio/archives/1009251900_clean.php

Here's another image from the wedding I shot with Craig in Kendal the weekend before last: the grandmother of the bride.

In other news ...

I'm the invited guest on this week's PhotoNetCast podcast which will (probably) be broadcast live on Friday, at 4am GMT, that's 7am local time for me (further details here). We'll be chatting about a variety of topics, including Extreme Exposure (my latest book), so tune in if you're around.

Also, you will probably have noticed that I've added a Tweetmeme button and Facebook Like button to most of my blog pages. I'm fairly sure these are working as they should, but please let me know if you have any problems with them.

While weddings are clearly events that centre around the bride and groom, one of the things I like best about them is that they're also comprised of a myriad of small but wonderful moments like this one.