Adam’s Wedding

On February 27th, 28th, and 29th of 2026, I had the pleasure and honor of attending my younger brother’s wedding—and photographing it. My wife, daughter, and I traveled to Nosara, Costa Rica for the occasion. It was a beautiful location and a wonderful celebration.

I’ve been interested in photographing weddings for a long time, but I’ve never pursued it seriously. Ahead of the trip, a friend from a local critique group helped me understand some of the basics: the situations to anticipate, equipment considerations, and, most importantly, the need to capture the moment in a style I’m comfortable with and accustomed to.

Photographing the wedding was nerve-wracking. I worried I wasn’t getting enough coverage of the ceremony, the setup, and the usual wedding photography themes. I was also challenged by technical considerations—especially flash. Costa Rica was intensely sunny during the day and quite dark at night, which meant managing highlights in bright light and finding workable approaches to nighttime scenes without sacrificing image quality.

The main takeaway was that I need to become more proficient with flash. Many of the images I made with flash had severely blown highlights and were nearly unusable. I also found that TTL didn’t always produce consistent results: some frames were blown out, while others were too dark. I need to learn how to use flash optimally, particularly at night.

During the day, flash provided some fill, but in almost every case I preferred the images made without it. At night, I shot the Leica SL2S with floating ISO and a relatively large aperture, and some images—even up to around ISO 50,000—were completely usable in color. The Leica M10 Monochrome with a 28mm Elmarit also produced very good, highly usable images, though with very high contrast in the evenings.

Attach images tagged Adam’s wedding.