MichaelHughes7A@xxxxxxx wrote:
On a more serious note even the fractional view of this series of events shows how far certain sections of society have gone in pushing wedding ceremonies and celebrations to the point where few can truly afford them.
They rent the lobby and grounds of the building I work in for weddings, so most Friday afternoons during the summer I get to watch them set up, and get to watch the photographers working with the bride and groom and others for portraits and group shots. (Mostly I'm gone before the real event gets started; or else so head-down in my code that I'm not watching the wedding.) I rarely see them set up for fewer than 200 people for dinner. Between that and the rental (and I get different answers on rental depending on who I ask), we're already up to $12,000 or so. I have yet to see a man acting as one of the photographers; always seems to be women out there with two DSLRs around their necks. More strangely, I've never seen them using any sort of light-modifiers or light sources for the pictures they're doing; they're working with 100% straight natural light. That seems like a major oversight to me.
My wife and I had a very nice wedding, coming up on 27 years ago now. Cost us around $200, I think. The one drawback is that almost no photos emerged from the experience; one person had to cancel at the last minute, and two others that should have known better both produced useless film. But we've never found that a huge tragedy, either.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
