JUSTIN L. STEWART PHOTOGRAPHY: PHOTOGRAPHY

Friday, January 24, 2020

LA Pride Parade 2019

This post apparently got buried by other work and life. I just stumbled across it in my drafts. I felt so frustrated on this self-assigned shoot. Photographing parades has always been a struggle for me. I didn't feel confident about any of the images I was making and I walked home unhappy with what I had done, sure I hadn't made any good frames.

Fortunately, when I got home and got to work on my photographs, there were frames that I was actually really happy with. Things had gone a lot better than I had previously thought. It was a great reminder of how hard so many of us photographers can be on ourselves and our work and the need to just cut ones self some slack.

Not all these photos are amazing or great, but I'm glad I got myself out there to make some fun frames and, through the frustration, I forced myself to experiment and get weird in an effort to make something worth looking at, and that was an experience and learning worth having.

So here's my super delayed posting of photographs from the 2019 LA Pride Parade in West Hollywood:

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Thursday, November 8, 2018

Surprise Wedding in Nice, France

This last month, I had the honor of photographing, videoing, and officiating the wedding of two of my favorite people. Now, pausing that and stepping back to the title, I'm sure some of you are confused. "Surprise wedding? WTF is that? How does that work?" Well, the groom didn't know he was going to be getting married until the day before the wedding. In fact, the whole thing was planned before the couple were engaged, though the groom had taken a previous couple swings at becoming engaged. So the groom was surprised when he got to the couple's Nice, France AirBnb with a letter about the ceremony, which would happen the next day.

It's hard to really put the experience into words that do it justice. It was amazing and overwhelming and full of love and hope. It's always so special for me when I can photograph something like this for people I care about. In a way, it makes the experience feel more shared and intimate for myself. I'm a part of the day and trying to make parts of the day that they'll carry as reminders for the rest of their lives. It's a big honor and something that really means something to me.

I wish I could better wrangle my thoughts for this post, but my brain's been all over the place. It's been a busy fall and I think I've become a bit scramble in the head. I did my best to edit down the massive collection of photos from the wedding, but it's still a lot. That being said, I always enjoy letting the photos breath in a blog post. Who knows if they'll ever get the chance to be seen outside of this?

So, without further rambling, here's a selection of some of my favorite images from the time I photographed, filmed, and married two of the kindest people I know: