Wedding of Gursev & Baldeep on 28th June 2009

behind the scenes by Hussein

Sevi & Bal's wedding took place at the Millennium Gloucester Road where we've filmed and photographed many weddings before.

We were really excited to try out some of our new gear. The first was a 4 meter jib crane. A fantastic piece of equipment to get mid air pan and rising shots. We arrived at the venue in plenty of time and parked right outside the entrance to unload our fairly heavy gear (usually we travel light). Unfortunately the lift to the conservatory was broken and we ended up carrying everything to the second floor! It took about 6 trips.

Have a look at our main website where there is a 10 minute video of this wedding (http://www.easternelegance.net/html/video.html) and you will see that we got some fantastic cinematic shots with the jib crane.

frame of slow pan shot

I also used the Canon 5D Mark II SLR camera. This is principally a stills camera but with the ability to record high definition 1080p video footage. But why would we use this when we already had two fantastic high definition camcorders with us? Surely such features on stills camera are gimmicky and usually only included in consumer models and on mobile phones! Definitely not the case with the Mark II. The image quality is stunning. It produce crisp, vibrant high definition video footage. Best of all you can use Canon L class lenses to amazing effect. I got some great footage with a fish eye, a 17-40L, a 24-105mm L as well as an L class 50mm prime. The telephoto end of the 24-105 and the 50mm 1.2L produced some truly stunning footage with the subject popping right out from the nicely blurred background. There is no real way to produce the fish eye effect with our normals camcorders and the only way to produce shallow depth of field with a camcorder would be to use a depth of field adapter such as a brevis or letus but this is a little impractical and can make the camcorder considerably heavier and bulkier.

(some frames from the Mark II footage)
15mm fisheye shot 1

15mm fisheye shot 2

low angle dance footage (aka sleeping on the job shot!)

We made great use of both the crane and the Mark II where appropriate but most of the footage was shot using our high defnition camcorders on a tripod or on a steadicam. The sound is just as important as the picture and we used Sennheiser wireless mircophones to obtain crystal clear audio during the ceremony.

The above images are frame captures from the high definition footage and are of a high quality so photographers better watch out!