ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR:

A wedding venue with it's own fairground? When Sam & Andy told me they'd booked Marleybrook House near Canterbury, well that was it. That was to be my highlight wedding of the year. Marleybrook house is an amazing wedding venue with a full fairground featuring dodgems, waltzer, helter skelter and many more rides. I love the challenge of a wedding with variety, but photographing in a fairground was new to me.

From the moment Sam told me of the fairground I immediately envisaged the shots that I wanted to take. I had experience of shutter drag shooting motor racing at Brands Hatch, but fairground rides was a new challenge for me.

So, where do you go to practice this kind of shoot? I thought about local village fairs, but no doubt I'd be feeling a tap on my should from the local constabulary hanging around fairgrounds taking pictures of strangers. Nope, I was going in cold trusting in my skills, knowledge and ability.

Give me a racing car flying past over 100mph, I can handle that, but I don't think any of us, especially Sam & Andy, had any idea how turbulent this ride would be - But it was great fun :)

My set up:

Canon R5 camera, with my trusty 24 to 70mm work horse lens. I had to fight the failing light balanced against depth of field as I wanted to go at f8 to make sure to stay in the focus zone. I kept the ISO down at 100 as I really wanted to reduce any graining but I knew I could bring this up if I needed more light. I initially went on a 1/60 shutter speed which is my preferred for motor racing, but I wasn't getting enough background blur. So I dropped it to 1/30.

The low shutter speed does invite the risk of blur on the main subject, but it gave me the perfect sense of speed with the blur, as well as allowing in enough light. So that was the perfect setting. There after it was just a case of tracking and shooting. I always use tracking and servo to ensure focus is maintained. Was this the first shot?, no...but it was the best of about 40 and the one that matched my vision and I was proud to include in the album for Sam & Andy.

You can see more of the Marleybrook House venue in my Weddings portfolio.