W. Cardone Productions Blog

On June 6 we had the distinct honor to capture the memories in motion of Kimberly and Atticus as they captured their dreams in matrimony at Zion Lutheran Church of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Atticus Flores, U of M ‘02 graduate, of Canton, Michigan, proposed to Kimberly Ellsworth, also a U of M  ‘02 graduate, during a romantic fall picnic in the Arboretum. Kimberly is a graphic designer at the U-M Law School. Atticus is an automotive product engineer at Plastech.

The staff and pastors of Zion were very helpful in helping us to capture wedding video memories that will serve this couple a lifetime. Of particular help was the church AV technician who went out of his way to assure that our site audio feed was superlative.

One technical issue we had to grapple with at Zion was the mixture in the sanctuary of outdoor daylight with indoor lighting. I am pleased to report that we had incredible success in overcoming this limitation. While photographers find this easy to deal with, videography imaging is challenged by it.

Digital imaging, whether still or video, must be balanced for the color or temperature of predominant light in a room. Once balanced, the light entering the imaging device cannot change its temperature without causing an objectionable change to the hue. While we can correct this in the edit room, results will be better if the original capture is balanced for color. For still imaging the photographer merely “swamps out” the ambient light with a flash. For video the problem surfaces when the camera frame moves from an area of one color to an area of another color. Such was the case at Zion Lutheran Church.

The sanctuary at Zion is architecturally divided between front and rear with a baptistery in the middle. Zion requirements for video and photography dictate that we cannot operate during the wedding ceremony any closer to the altar than the baptistery. The color of light for the rear half was predominantly daylight while the front was tungsten. This, therefore meant that to follow the processional of the bridal party down the isle a fundamental color shift occurred at about the middle. Our solution was to have one camera dedicated to following each celebrant down only half of the isle. The camera on the right covered the processional only until the middle and the camera on the left picked them up from the middle and followed them to the altar.

This, however, was not the end of the problem. The camera on the right, balanced for daylight, had to swing into a tungsten colored frame at the conclusion of the entry processional. Fortunately, our cameras are bi-modal for color. For the camera on the right we solved for two separate color balances before the ceremony. When it was then time for that camera to swing into a tungsten frame a simple switch was flipped for the alternate color balance.

At the reception, Kensington Court Hotel, we had an opportunity to view samples of the photographer’s work and decided it was excellent.

We were particularly impressed, however, with the live entertainment Kimberly and Atticus had selected for their reception. “Two for the Road,” Vincent Vitale and Brian Bogozzi, were very creative in providing live family oriented entertainment and dance music. These two knew how to engage an audience, keep them informed of events of the evening, and provide for a memorable reception. We highly recommend Two for the Road and have added them to our link resources web page.

In addition, Brian and Vincent went out of their way in helping us to capture stunning audio for the couple’s video. At reception or dinner events where toasts or other speaking activities take place, we attempt to secure an audio line from the DJ to feed an audio recording device. This frees us from having to individually mike speakers or handing them a second handheld microphone to awkwardly grapple with. The price we pay for this, however, is a dependency on the DJ to send us quality audio. While we always have redundant audio sources for these events, the primary audio source is preferred and “Two for the Road” gave us pristine audio for Kimberly and Atticus’ video.

A nice touch the couple provided for their wedding reception guests was a shutter photo booth where guests could have their photographs taken.