Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Making wedding plans
Already we are at the end of June! Time to start making plans if you’re getting married later in the year or early next year.
It’s an exciting time, lots of choices and plenty of decisions.
This list is a helpful timeline for wedding planning.
- More than 12 months before your wedding
- Look at dates and times for your wedding.
- Decide on the size, formality and setting of your wedding.
- Make a wedding and engagement budget.
- Reserve the locations for your wedding and reception.
- Meet with and book your wedding celebrant or clergy.
- Choose your wedding party and make sure everyone is up for the job.
- Choose your wedding rings.
- Make a preliminary guest list.
- Sort out your engagement party.
- 9–12 Months Before your wedding
- Sort your wedding dress.
- Book your photographer.
- Reserve a venue.
- Book your music or DJ.
- Arrange flowers with your florist.
- Sort out your wedding cake.
- Make gift choices.
- Sort accommodation for your guests.
- Plan your honeymoon.
- 6–9 Months Before
- Decide on menu choices.
- Sort out cars.
- Order your invitations.
- Check marriage licence.
- 3–6 Months Before
- Fine tune your guest list.
- Choose the reader for your ceremony.
- Decide on flowers with florist.
- Book the Guy’s suits
- Make plans for hair and hairdresser
- Make plans for makeup
- 2 Months Before
- Post the invites.
- Decide on your wedding vows or make your own.
- Finalise the menu.
- Confirm the wedding details with celebrant, musician.
- Purchase any gifts required.
- Make appointments for nails and make-up.
- Schedule dress fitting.
- 1 Month Before
- 2 Weeks Before
- Have a Hens night and Stag do.
- Look at speeches.
- Finalise reception details.
- Call any guests who have not replied.
- Meet with your hairdresser and make-up artist for consultation.
- Deliver song lists to musician or playlists to DJ.
- Confirm honeymoon reservations.
- In the Week before
- Sort seating plan.
- Determine the order of the day.
- Have a rehearsal.
- Confirm accommodation reservations.
- Pick up the suits for boys.
- Confirm the final numbers with caterer.
- Confirm details for cars.
- Deliver your marriage licence to celebrant.
- Make a seating plan for the reception and write out place cards.
- Choose someone to return any rented items after the wedding.
- Write any cheques required for the wedding day.
- Pack for your honeymoon.
- On the Day
- Give the rings to the best man.
- Have fun on your special day!
Why Donegal House is good
Donegal House is steeped with local history and has a unique welcoming and relaxed Irish atmosphere unrivalled in New Zealand. With your very own self contained Irish Stone Cottage set in 6 acres of tranquil gardens & lakes you can have the wedding of your dreams with your friends & family.
Accommodation
Donegal House is Bed & Breakfast accommodation with 29 ensuite rooms.
Menu choices
Donegal have a variety of menu options to suit your needs, budget and numbers. From buffet style, set menu to finger food they will work with you to choose the best option for your day.
Small wedding or large wedding
The Stone cottage at Donegal has an Irish theme in décor and features impressive macracarpa tables that will seat over 100 guests with room to add extra tables for numbers up to 150. Depending on the style of wedding you are looking for they can cater for larger numbers and also have 10 round tables available for you to use, popular for the smaller weddings.
Entertainment
Depending on the style and atmosphere you are aiming for, Donegal have a sound system you are welcome to use for CD’s, DVD’s during dinner and to connect a laptop computer through. For after dinner entertainment if you are looking for a party atmosphere & dancing they recommend a Band or DJ. Plenty of room to boogie into the night.
Visit Donegal House website
Posted in Around Kaikoura, Wedding | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
NZ Bride & Groom May – July edition has a nice wee story about a bit of fun Charlotte, Michael and I had the day after their wedding.
Charlotte and Mike are outdoor activities folk and we thought it would be cool to include some outdoor aspects in a relaxing Sunday afternoon shoot with no wedding day deadlines to meet.
We headed out to the shoreline at Oaro and let our imaginations run wild with diving gear, a boat and even a retro lawn tractor we came across on the way to the beach. All good fun and the guys got to get dressed up twice. The flowers even got another round of being flowers.
Grab your copy and check out the story Bride & Groom mag.
Posted in Wedding | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
I took delivery of a 7D early last week, the timing was perfect as my 1DsMKII went off to the Canon workshops for it’s second shutter replacement, the current one lasting not very long! That’s another story and we won’t even go there at the moment.
I had a keen interest in the 7D as soon as I heard the rumours of it’s upcoming release, seems Canon had decided to up the ante on their prosumer range of gear and the features list seemed worth having a look at. I put my order in with the good folk at Photo & Video and got a pleasant surprise when they rang me in the first week of October to say the shipment had arrived.
The obligatory glance through the manual while having my 3rd flat white on the morning the camera was dropped off by the courier, then I plugged on a lens and set it to work. Well, not really work, a couple of days of sorting it out which could have been one day if I had read the manual properly in the first place.
There’s a lot of new and useful technology in the 7D and you need to read the book to make the best of it.
A week has now gone by since it arrived and I’ve now had a chance to test the 7D in the rigours of a wedding day. I did all the shooting for the day with the 7D except for the ceremony when I had two camera/lens combinations on the go.
So.. what’s to like with the 7D.
Handling/ergonomics
Out of the box the 7D feels nice. It almost feels like a 1 series build with a solid feel and nice grippy textured rubber in all the right places. The finger and thumb positioning is perfect for my (average size) hands, all the buttons are well placed and after one week I can operate the camera easily without second guessing any of the controls.
After a few years of using 1 series canons I am well used to the bulk of a battery booster and like the balance and handling they give to the camera, I have my order in for a booster for the 7D.
Viewfinder/focus
The first time you look through the viewfinder on the 7D you hardly know where to look, it’s big, bright and beautiful. Can be set to display a grid and electronic level, perfect for folk like myself who don’t know straight from crooked.
The Auto focus is impressive with 19 points and selectable focus zones. Very fast and seems accurate.
Shooting speed
The 7d is a race horse with a shoot speed of 8 frames per second and a burst buffer of 126 jpgs or 15 RAW images. That’s faster than I’m going to need for most of my photography but very useful for when I get out for a bird or wildlife shoot.
Wireless flash control
I’m loving this and used it several times on jobs in the last week. Speedlights can be run wirelessly from the camera. Just set the Speedlights to slave mode and go wild either in ETTL or Manual with ratios and all settings done remotely from the camera. Set your flash to 1/2 power manual and it magically is set and fires as commanded. I’ve used it for interior real estate shoots and it works great, seems to be reliable indoors where there are plenty of places for the infared to bounce and trigger the flash but haven’t tested it outdoors yet.
ISO
ISO 12800! Don’t know how useful that can be but I’ve made a 1/2 second exposure at f4.0 of my back lawn in the pitch dark and can see my kids’s pet rabbits in their cage. There is a fair bit of noise happening but it is still an image. Using the camera at ISO 1600 seems to make very usable and not over noisy files.
Any problems?
Nothing major. I shot a set of images with 70 – 200 2.8 lens wide open and none of them were focused. They looked fine on the 7D LCD but they were trash when I ingested them. Of course they happened to be the first images I looked at and I had a major flip out when it crossed my mind I had shot a whole day of unfocused images. I did a focus test on the 70 -200 and it was miles out for some reason. They were the only images I shot with the lens full open all day luckily, a reminder to test gear before setting into a job. Did an AF micro adjustment on the lens and it is focusing sweet. Tested my other lenses and they were all good.
I’ve always been a bit suspect about Hi resolution APS-C sensor cameras after using 1 series Canons with their huge sensors, big pixels and low noise. The 7D files do have a different look than I am used to with a little more noise, not unpleasant it’s almost like a film grain. The next project is to sort out a RAW processing workflow that makes things look nice. Lightroom or ACR are working in beta but the results did not seem too impressive. I guess shooting JPG would solve a lot of problems but I always end up going back to RAW because I enjoy it.
RAW developer turned out to be the trick. It’s a good grunty RAW processor made by a proactive developer who already has it tweaked for 7D files.
And the verdict…
Liking it! It handles nice, the performance is good, image quality is looking good – I’m looking forward to a long and productive summer with this peice of gear.
And there’s the video to check out yet!
Gallery of good looking people – images made with Canon 7D
And a couple of useful links;
Photo & Video – Kick Ass camera suppliers
Check focus on your DSLR
Seriously serious RAW processor
Posted in Equipment, Wedding | 12 Comments »
