One rainy, spring evening, I was sitting with Abby and her friends on the patio of Harris Grill in Shadyside. It was Bacon Night. It was also the night that Robin asked me to be the second-shooter at her wedding. “I want you to shoot some hipster photos,” she said, as a basket of bacon was calmly passed around the table. I looked at Louis, the excellent/self-depricating photographer I call friend, and he shot me a look of confidence. Okay. I’ll be your Man Friday.

The marriage of Robin Hitchcock and Collin Diedrich was, in some ways, the fulcrum of the summer. It was the turning point: the event that marked not only the middle of the the three-month slog from June to August, but also the big sandwich union between two people I’ve become good friends with over the course of the past year. It also meant that Abby would be flying home from Troy, NY to be in the wedding, giving me a much-needed reprieve from missing her for 4 weeks straight. I couldn’t wait to see Abby and watch as she helped give away one of her best friends.

Robin

Robin has been blogging about her wedding, and wedding culture in general, for some time now. I’d say she’s an expert on this stuff. She had demanded, despite his objections, that Louis shoot her wedding. He couldn’t turn her down. From the moment I became his sidekick, I fretted over the immensity of the situation (as all good sidekicks tend to do). I wanted this wedding to be perfect for Robin, and I wanted her photos to capture that perfection. I knew Louis would be fine, but for me… I had never done anything like this before. I was being paid. I was technically a professional in some minor capacity.

The week leading up to the wedding was a haze of preparation, birthday celebrations (I’m 26 now, by the way), and wedding organization. I went to dinner with Louis, Robin, and Collin at the Grand Concourse–the historic train station that would hold both the wedding ceremony and reception. We tested light levels and got a lay of the land. I was going to shoot with three kinds of cameras at the wedding: my trusty Nikon D40 DSLR, my even trustier Pentax K1000 35mm camera, and the always unreliable and usually disappointing Holga 120. Traditional film, like a good spouse, is sensitive and forgiving even when you screw up a little bit–my big fear was that I would take dozens of photos and have them all be underexposed, and with the Holga there was no way to manually adjust the settings. I took a lot of notes at that dinner.

Louis also gave me a crash course on flash photography a few days later. He was lending me one of his Nikon SB-800 flashes, a device that cost about as much as my D40. Having never been a fan of flash, I would need a couple training montages to learn the basics before the wedding. He showed me the settings, took a dozen photos of my greasy face as examples of different techniques, and sent me on my way. I spent that evening photographing the Planet of the Apes bust I have on my bookshelf–if a large simian-man in a green jumpsuit showed up at the Concourse, he would have been lit perfectly.

Enough camera worrying. I could only stress out about the theory behind all this photography so much before it was time to act. The rehearsal dinner and boat cruise was on Friday. The wedding, and the various photo shoots and preparation involved, was on Saturday. Sunday was brunch. The bacon that brought about this whole wedding-photo-adventure would be waiting for me at the finish line. Let’s do this.

The rehearsal ceremony.

Liz, Annie, and Abby at the rehearsal dinner aboard the Gateway Clipper.

Robin waits as her aunt and mother-in-law help her into her dress.

Robin finishes putting on her lipstick. She’s ready to go see Collin.

At Fatheads Saloon in the Southside, the bar where they first met & kissed over Guinness.

Their first kiss as husband and wife.

Robin and Collin thunderously enter the reception.

John takes dancing very seriously.

Robin and a portion of her Bridal Hootenanny crew.

In all, I wound up with about 200 solid photos from my Nikon and five rolls of film from the Pentax & Holga. While it’ll be two weeks before I get that film back from Pittsburgh Custom Darkroom, I handed over my digital photos to Robin and Collin as they left on their honeymoon. I’m anxious to see how the film turns out, but I know that at the very least, even if it all comes back blank because I left the lens cap on (pro tip: I left my Holga’s lens cap at home), I know that I captured moments to the best of my abilities. I needed to. This was a big sandwich.

The wedding was perfect. The ceremony was beautiful and loving. The reception was filled with tearful speeches, a flash mob dance, and more homemade donuts than I had ever dreamed of. While shooting, carrying equipment, holding light stands, and helping Louis was a lot of work, it was great work. He produced some amazing photos. I learned from. I had fun. And I was still more than able to enjoy myself, to dance and spend as much time with Abby as I could, to meet more of her excellent friends, and to celebrate the marriage of two awesome people.

When I sat down at brunch on Sunday, with my bacon, I was a happy kind of exhausted. This fulcrum had changed the summer. It had done its simple task that had taken over a year to plan and mere hours to execute. All of the people who gathered to watch this union would be going separate ways now, happier for what they had seen.

Congratulations Robin & Collin. You’re hitched.

[To see some more of my photos, you can check out my flickr set. Whenever the film comes back, expect more.]