Last weekend I took a day trip out of Shanghai to attend Vanessa’s best friend’s wedding back in her home town of Tiantai in Zhejiang, which neighbours Shanghai to the south. It’s around a four hour drive from Shanghai to Tiantai.
Weddings are arduous affairs in Zhejiang which involve little or no sleep in the lead up to the ceremony at noon. For this particular wedding, I needed to be at the groom’s family home at 2am. While Vanessa needed to be at the bride’s family home at the same time.
Although the families live less than a kilometre from each other, a procession of cars, led by the groom in a rented Bentley, set off just before 3am to arrive at the bride’s home.
From there, the groom and his entourage marched up to the front door of the wife’s place and went through a kind of pantomime of bribing his way in with red envelopes filled with cash. HIs wife was waiting, dressed in a traditional red wedding gown, sitting on her bed.
Before he read a promise written by the bride, which basically said he would be her servant, the bride and groomsmen (including me) were required to make themselves look ridiculous by passing playing cards to each other using just their mouth (so much for social distancing) and ejecting pingpong balls from a box with a hole in it tied to the small of their backs. This is achieved by the men shaking their rumps and jumping up and down.
Then it was time for soup wantons and everyone headed over to the groom’s place. Actually the couple married last year, but they consulted an astrologer to pick a date for their wedding party. Although it looked like it might have been delayed by the coronavirus, in the end it wasn’t.
Although I shot a few photos, I wasn’t the official photographer. They already had one of those. It was interesting to see that their hired photographer hardly shot anything that wasn’t set up first. Everything was staged, so it was pretty much the opposite of how I shoot weddings.
Anyway, here are a few shots from the day. I just brought my Nikon D850 with a 50mm 1.8G lens on it. In some settings, a 35mm lens would have been better, but on the whole, the 50 did the job.
Things wrapped up at around 2pm after which Vanessa and I (somehow) drove out to the surrounding mountains for hike. We have to pull over for a power nap on the way back.
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