'K.

So I was living in Seattle at the time which means I was a plane flight away. And I was getting paid enough to buy a slide scanner, which I had up until six months ago, which means I couldn't just tell my family to fuck off like I so desperately wanted to.

For starters, everyone who stayed over was put up in The Bates Motel. It was, according to TripAdvisor (Yelp didn't exist yet), "The worst motel in Boulder." It was bad enough that a lot of people bailed on their reservations and stayed elsewhere without telling my aunt. And I, at least, was told I wouldn't need to rent a car because it was only a mile and a half from their house. So that was awesome.

We'll also add in the fact that since I was getting paid, my aunt figured I was her bitch for the day. So at 8am I'm up and taking pictures of her cat's grave. And her rose bushes. And an addition they put on the house, if I recall correctly. Normally when I shoot weddings I get the "prep" - the bachelor party rolling up with bloodshot eyes, the bridesmaids primping and putting on makeup. Depending on how the bride feels about it, I'm often in the room as the dress gets put on, etc. It's actually really fun. Everyone's nervous but everyone's generally in a really good mood and it's contagious.

This is Boulder, though, with my Little Fluffy Clouds cousins, so the "prep" isn't quite what you'd expect. For one thing, they're practicing a dance routine they intend to do. As in, my cousin has decided that she's going to do a dance number with her bridesmaids at the reception. That morning. And it must be rehearsed.

(It's worth mentioning that everyone on that side of the family is bipolar, and that between the three of them, they've been institutionalized four times)

When bridesmaids can break away from the dance number (and I think it might have been Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive"), they're building bouquets for the reception. Some flowers from a flower shop, some from the yard. Some in vases, some in jars.

I'll admit - part of my apprehension as to the lack of planning was due to a fundamental misunderstanding as to the nature of a Quaker wedding. You can read up if you want, but basically, everyone sits in a circle in silence, people pipe up and say things every now and then, and when the "vibe" is right, the bride and groom announce they're married and everyone goes and eats cake.

What could go wrong, right?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that at a Quaker wedding, the entire congregation is invited. And it's rude if they don't show up. So your guest list is automatically the size of the congregation.

From a photographer's point of view, it's also important to note that you have no way to tell which of these utterances matters to the couple and which utterances don't. So you'd best shoot 'em all, cowboy.

You also have no fucking clue how long this is going to take. Could be ten minutes. Could be hours. And I'm shooting film. I'm shooting 35mm on a Nikon F5 and I'm shooting 6x7 on a Pentax. used to be if you were tasked with a ridiculous fuck-you wedding like this you'd load up a roll back that would take 50 feet of print film and you'd let fly. But I'd gotten good at loading the F5 quickly and I wasn't intending to whip out the 6x7 until we got to the formals.

Which, by the way, are going to be natural light. Why? Because we're doing this at Estes Park. Except not at Estes Park, at a ranch near Estes Park because they know somebody with a clearing.

A clearing with five parking spots.

So. Stage is set. We're a 45 minute drive up into the woods on the outskirts of Boulder. We're shooting an event that looks for all the world like a group meditation. We're starting at 2 in the afternoon but since every single guest needs to be ferried in by hook or by crook nobody has any real belief in that deadline. Sunset is about 6:30 so in theory we've got 4 and a half hours for some meditation, some whack-a-mole and some formals. Fuck yeah. We can do this.

Get in my ride and there's a package at my feet. My aunt has taken it on herself to decide that I'm not just the photographer. She's gone to the local AV shop and asked about "recording a wedding." So they rented her a PortaDAT and a shotgun mic. No boom pole, no bag, no zeppelin, no beta snake, no hops, none of that stuff you'd use if you were trying to record video for audio... no, we've got a portaDAT and a Sennheiser 416.

And a field full of people ahead of us.

So a great wedding photographer's trick is "steal the ladder." Find a couple of them if you can - ask whoever represents the church - and set them up somewhere you have a good vantage point. People look better from above than they do from straight on and nobody blocks your view. Also a good fast telephoto helps a bunch. I wasn't one of those in-your-face wedding photographers; I shot my ceremonies like I was on wildlife safari, interfering with the nuptials as little as possible. Which is good, because I've got an 8 foot ladder, a 70-210 f/2.8 and a sylvan glade full of 600 people.

Fuck yeah.

I pointed the shotgun at the goddamn sky and hit "record." If nothing else, it was a great test of the sideband rejection.

So that out of the way, we settle in for, oh, half an hour of sitting around and popping off any fucker that stands up, right? If the wedding couple are home plate, half these people are in the outfield; nobody can hear their asses anyway.

and then it somehow got worse

So - remember, bride's family are Quakers. This is their 'hood. Sound of one hand clapping and shit. They're down. Groom's family are Baptists. They don't know what the fuck is going on. They hear "silence" and assume it's "uncomfortable silence" and speak into it.

All of them.

Over and over.

See, to them, it was an AA meeting. "Hi, my name is Aunt Verna and I love these kids." "Hi, Aunt Verna." "It's been two years since I saw little Teddy last..."

and you'd best get a shot of every single one of them, cowboy.

So instead of placidly picking off telephoto portraits I'm skulking from ladder to ladder like a goddamn ninja 'cuz I'm the only thing moving. I'm shooting what I can, but I'm running out of ammo. It's now 30 minutes until dark and I'm down to my last three rolls of film and I've still got formals to shoot and holy shit have we really been doing this for three and a half hours?

...and then my cousin decides she's married.

So. There's about 20 minutes to get everybody arranged, get everybody lined up, get everybody smiling and light off every single possible formal photo they could possibly want from this accursed nightmare of a ceremony. My perspective only - everybody else loves it. On the plus side, there's barely enough film to do much... on the minus side, what film there is 220, which you get 18 shots out of with 6x7. Which, by the way, doesn't have a light meter. And it's magic hour, which means you're losing a stop of light every ten minutes.

I think I did okay.

So now it's time to go shoot the reception. Which is several hours late (apparently the caterers asked for a time and were given one, but it being a quaker wedding, nobody at the wedding was told of this). My family, who had driven up in a car that broke down twice, had been waiting there for us for two hours. For added fun, I've been forbidden to use a flash and when I checked light with my now-empty F5, it told me I'd need about a half second to get a decent exposure on the ISO 200 film I was rawkin'. So. Camera is wrapped.

I wish I'd brought a video camera, though. They came up with the awesome idea of a "kid's cake" - literally two giant sheet cakes with a table full of icing, sprinkles, jelly beans, M&M's, chocolate chips, you name it - so that the kids could "decorate" their own dessert. We're talkin' buttercream frosting piled like Cool Whip encrusted in M&Ms with gummy worms jacking out of it like flagella. And then the kids ate it.

My primary memory of that wedding was watching a shell-shocked bridesmaid passing her 4-year-old son from one hand to another as he ran endlessly in circles around her, like a little sucrose-powered tetherball. At one point he tripped, crashed, cried and fell asleep before she could get him up again.

And that's why I don't shoot weddings.