Leon, one of Rae’s friends from high school, tied the knot yesterday with his childhood sweetpea, Paula. The wedding was held at the Lakeside Presbyterian Church along 19th Avenue in San Francisco and was followed by a reception at the prestigious San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The SFMOMA’s lobby and next-door Caffè Museo were transformed into a colorful celebration of Leon and Paula’s love for each other.
Aesthically speaking, the reception at the SFMOMA was among the best that I’ve seen over the past two years of attending weddings. Gastronomically speaking, the food was also very delectable. In Caffè Museo, we had plenty of hot and sour eggrolls, lamb biscuits, and ahi tuna appetizers. Dinner came courtesy of McCall’s, and my filet mignon was nicely tender and juicy. The real treat came at the end when a dessert tray filled with fruit, chocolates, and sweet biscuits arrived at our table.
Guests were allowed access to the museum’s fourth floor, where an exhibition of work by noted German painter Gerhard Richter is currently on display. Forty Years of Painting “presents a full-scale survey of paintings by the influential German artist” and “features 140 paintings from every phase of Richter’s career.” We were impressed by some of Richter’s oils, which looked buttery smooth and near-photographic. Though I didn’t care for his abstract modernist paintings, I do respect his desire to extend his skills into diverse art genres.
As a photographic exercise, I shot many of the images in the RAW format, as opposed to JPEG. RAW provides a number of benefits to the digital photographer, including 2 stops of exposure compensation, adjustable color matrices and white balance controls. Futhermore, the EOS-1D allows the simultaneous creation of RAW and JPEG files when shooting, which is great if you want the convenience of JPEG and the flexibility of RAW. The only drawback is the file size increase. A 1GB Microdrive now holds 250 images instead of 500 images. For photojournalist work, JPEG’s good enough, but for weddings, RAW’s the way to go.
The lighting at the SFMOMA made for great available light photography. I minimized my use of the flash, since that would have blow out the lovely orange and purple hues enveloping the museum.
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