Saturday, January 15

This Immortal Union



A family affair, the marriage of Marty and Lockey included relatives from near and far. I think the only friends that were invited took part in the ceremony. I was there to take pictures.

What a place! If you are ever in Stockton be sure to find the University of Pacific campus and open the door to Morris Chapel. They'll let you have a look-see. This is the first of California's colleges. Ivy League look-alike buildings and landscape. Wonderfully non-Californian, I guess. The chapel is a great, big, echo-chamber affair which is now used mainly to host weddings. There's another church across the street that's used to hold services (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright).

Shooting a wedding in this cavernous chapel is no easy task. The lighting is practically a nonentity. And existing light shots have a yellowish-creamy cast to them. At night, only the front stained-glass is lit from the outside. Our 6 p.m. predicament was added to by a flash unit that had a bad connection and wouldn't work most of the time. Thankfully, I brought three cameras. A lot of the returned prints were horrible, so everything had to be doctored and reprinted!

Hopefully, the bride and groom will get over it. The pictures, I mean. This was a shoestring budget affair, altho they gave me a nice 'donation.' I just feel really bad because of the poor quality of the pictures.

"One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul," said Balzac.

"What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life --- to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting." George Eliot

What greater, indeed?

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