Wence and I made the trek out to Yakima to shoot Ryan and Rachel’s wedding.  We made the wise decision to drive over on Friday night rather than Saturday morning and thanks to Wence’s driving, we made it from Seattle to our hotel in Yakima in almost exactly 2 hours, which included a break to get fast food in Ellensburg.  With a good, solid 8 hours of sleep under our belts, it was business as usual starting with photographing the groom and groomsmen getting ready at the hotel.  We then headed over to the bride’s parent’s residence to document getting into the wedding dress, and then took the wedding party photos at the Yakima Arboretum.  After a quick 45 minutes there, we made haste to the church, where both the wedding ceremony and reception took place.  Everything went smoothly and we were back on the road to Seattle by about 8 pm.

While my old D200 still did a great job with the Alpers-Merani Wedding, the high ISO noise compared to the D300 bugged me a great deal.  Luckily, Eugene was nice enough to let me borrow his D300 to be my second body for this wedding, and it proved its worth very well since the church was much darker than I had expected.  I used the same wide gamut of lenses at this wedding except for the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 and the Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 Micro.  The Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 once again proved to be a great low-light lens during the reception, especially since it’s nowhere near as obtrusive-looking as the big “Hatori Hanzo” Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR.  Since the 50mm didn’t get much use, I actually did end up selling it in favor of the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 that I bought from Mackey. Anyway, here’s a link to the galleries:

http://verdugo.smugmug.com/Weddings/Donckers-Klingele-Wedding

And a few of my personal favorites:

Congratulations again to Ryan and Rachel!  It was a pleasure to work with you 🙂