the world's most painful wedding, sorta
I won't go into the details of how I got into this, but I ended up being a assistant photographer to a guy I never met at a wedding of two people I also never met. This guy, Lou, is trying to be a wedding photographer on the side of his other job, to help pay for all of his gadgets because he is a gadget hound. He has shadowed another photographer and flown solo twice, the solo flights didn't go so good so he paid me to help him at this very large wedding. After agreeing, he tells me that he didn't know if it mattered, but the wedding was all black people and in East St. Louis. Black people I do not have a problem with. Black people that hate white people is where the problem could occur, and if you were to look for these people, they would be located in East St. Louis. If you are unfamiliar, East St. Louis is one of the most notorious places for crime. I didn't want to fink out and look racist, so I put on my, "I'm sure they are very nice" mentality and proceeded. I got a little bit lost in East St. Louis, as I, and no one I know has ever been there before. I knew I was in the right area, so I flew around each scary block until I found the church. I pulled into the church lot, which has an eight foot tall fence with three strings of barbed wire at the top. I removed the radar detector and the satelite radio from the dash. I actually pulled the whole chunk of the dash it was attached to off and put it under the seat. I thought I would save someone the trouble. The people were indeed nice enough. I got to bullshitting with the guys a bit. The girls were more standoffish, but they warmed up some too. There were all kinds of details about this day I could go on about, but the biggest points I want to make have to be the photographer I was helping. He was as white as anybody, but had a hispanic name. He was in his fifties. The first thing I had a problem with was he was trying to learn everyone's names. First of all, there were 11 bridesmaids, 11 groomsmen, two flower girls, two ring bearers, junior bride, junior groom, junior bridesmaid, junior groomsmen, you get the idea. On a normal wedding, I don't have the time or patience to tell the difference between Jim and Joe. I point where they need to go and they go there and then we all go on with our lives. This guy, Lou, introduced himself and asked everyone's name as he photographed them individually. Which you don't need individual shots of the groomsmen anyway. Perhaps one with each of them with the groom, but anyway, lets say their names were not names that were familiar to us. The name thing wasn't going well. He came to the junior groomsmen who was a bit of a mumbler and he tried three times and couldn't get his name right and then said, "We'll just call you T!" It was horrible. Then there was the guy with the squity eyes that wore sunglasses because that was his thing. I say, if that is your thing, I'm here to capture the day and the people in it, by all means, wear the glasses. Lou wished for the removal of the glasses. Then he found his eyes to be too squinty so he requested that he open his eyes more, which resulted in a bit of an uncomfortable for everyone buldging eye effect. Also painful to watch. I was trying to go with a 'you be you and I'll be me and we'll try to be cool and take these photos as fast as possible so you all can go have fun at the reception' thing. Lou was trying to be super best friends and it was trying way too hard and it showed. He told one of the bridesmaids she could be a model, he said this when she was getting her picture taken with her father who was a groomsmen and then he started to ramble, "Look at this pretty lady, you could be a model.............. I'm sure your father could help you with that...." Like, what does that mean? I wanted to be wearing a shirt that read, "Dude, I don't know this guy." I wasn't hired on to go to the reception, which was good because I was pretty sure Lou was going to end up stabbed by the end of the day, and it was because I was going to be the one to do it.
posted by Stacy @ 3:10 PM
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