Shiny Happy People
Let's play a game, shall we?

What is this picture of?



Because I understand my basic demographic, I'll make it multiple choice. Is it:

a) Liberace's living room
b) the surface of the sun as taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite
c) the Light at the End of the Tunnel
d) Ozzfest 2005, main stage
e) Blood sacrifice ceremony to appease Huitzilopochtli, the sun-god of ancient Tenochtitlan

You have thirty minutes to complete the test. Starting... now!

I'll wait.

Waiting...

Waiting...

Not porn surfing, just innocently waiting...

Waiting...

OK, enough. Let's review. Did you say B? You said B, right?

Ha! Wrong, dumb-ass! Haha! B? Seriously? I'd be disappointed if I weren't so amused.

Actually, it's a picture taken from my wedding, which was eight years ago today.

When I see pictures from the Blessed Event like this... it's hard to convey exactly what I feel and what I think. Mostly from this picture, I think: "Wow. I really, really overpaid the goddamn photographer."

See, here's a tip for those of you who are unmarried, but plan to be some day (with apologies to my gay Bucketeers... maybe in the next administration): get married someplace that is ugly and/or boring to look at. If you get married someplace beautiful, you have two problems. 1) Beautiful = ruinously expensive and 2) you run the risk (like we did) of your photographer being more interested in the architecture than in your stupid wedding. The bastard goes to weddings every single weekend of his life, so it's possible that your nuptials might not be the most intellectually stimulating thing in front of him that day. This means it's also possible that, say, throughout your entire ceremony he might play with his shutter speeds to elongate film exposure and make some fancy lighting effects in your wedding pictures.

Of course the down side is that when anybody moves at all--like that silly part at the end where the bride and groom kiss--it will be lost forever in a blur of long exposure because Snappy McCamera was going for his Wedding Photo Pulitzer.

We went with this photographer because he was relatively inexpensive as compared to some others we met. How sad we were when we were made to understand why.

Needless to say, our wedding was nowhere near that shiny. If the metal statuary were giving off that kind of light, we would have had to have a triage center set up outside the chapel to treat for radiation sickness. No, to the naked eye, the setting was less luminescently spectacular. We made our guests sick in the traditional wedding way, with cloying romanticism and food poisoning.

The moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you gets what you pays for. If you want competence, be prepared to pay for it. If you skimp on the photographer, do yourself a favor and skimp on the whole thing. If the pictures are going to be crappy, the event might as well be crappy as well, thereby minimizing the crushing disappointment later when you get the pictures back. No long churches, no arranged flowers, no towering altar-backdrops with gold statues of angels and saints,* nothing. If the chapel doesn't have an Elvis impersonator on-staff, you're overdoing it.

This is me being helpful.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.5 (minus the 0.5 for being helpful)


Pops



*= which is probably a violation of the First Commandment anyway... or is that the Second Commandment, the thing about the graven images... damn. Ever since they took the 7-ton monolith out from in front of the courthouse, I can never remember which Commandment is which.
- posted by Pops @ 10:52 AM