Last week I came back from shooting a beautiful wedding in France and got to see my favourite band play in my very own hometown. After meeting the band last year and asking them to play a show in Belfast, to finally see them here was something else. A very surreal experience indeed.

Music as an art form sits right up there with documentary photography for me. And as a band, Pearl Jam over the last twenty years, are what has shaped my musical tastes and perhaps even life philosophies.

So what is it about this great rock band that I love so much? Michael Stipe referred to Vedder as “Great chunks of repeating and overlapping guitar, a meandering-until-it-nails-you-in-the-forehead-melody, and a small wave of the hand. Colossal.”

For me it’s all of that and the passion.

The passion they have for their music. Passion for their fans. Passion for how their albums are packaged. You never see a Pearl Jam album as just a disk in a cheap plastic box. To their credit they also refuse to make cheesy music videos and concentrate on making great music instead.

Consider also their early release on vinyl of their third album a full week before it came out on CD and you’ll see a band that refuses to compromise to the industry and one that cares passionately about what they do and how their art is presented to the public.

I’m also a great lover of photographs of the band just doing their thing. In their environment – the studio and on stage. The most iconic photographs of the band are from photographer Lance Mercer. Here are a couple of my early favourites (distributed under a creative commons licence).

You may find prints (of Pearl Jam and other great artists) on sale at the Morrison gallery in New York.

Laura and Colin married each other at the beautiful Cunningham Memorial Presbyterian Church in Cullybackey before heading up the road to Galgorm Manor for their wedding reception. The weather was pretty changeable but thankfully the rain managed to keep away and we ended up with a lovely wedding day.

Laura sent me this lovely email after seeing her pictures on return from honeymoon:

Hi Dylan,
The photographs are amazing! So pleased with them. I have watched the slideshow at least a dozen times and still get emotional! The photos bring back so many wonderful memories of the day and I wasn’t even aware you were there. Thanks so much.
Best wishes,
Laura

Last week Jo and Andy brought me down to Dublin with them for a little portrait session. Here are some photographs as we walked through Trinity College and Dublin’s city streets.

When Joanne booked me as the photographer for her wedding we discovered that we were both massive Pearl Jam fans and that we were both in the crowd at the Point Theatre, Dublin, way back in October 1996 as Pearl Jam took to the stage with ‘Release’. Needless to say, I’m really looking forward to their wedding in October this year. :)

Incidentally, as we were walking through Trinity a wedding party emerged from the church. As I noticed the photographer, we waited to observe him in action.

So, the bridal party gathered at the top of the steps and everyone starts to greet the bride and groom and offer their congratulations. There are hugs, kisses, laughs; tears even. A little flowergirl is running around. The bride and groom look so happy!

My eye automatically starts to see all these little moments and fabulous picture opportunities. My brain starts to whirr! I can feel my natural instincts kicking in before I have to remind myself to keep distance (after all, I’m not the hired gun at this gig!).

So what does the traditional “wedding photographer” do while all this is going on?

Nothing. He simply stands there and misses it all! Camera in hand, waiting for the ‘group shot’, he takes not one single photograph. He doesn’t move. All those moments have gone forever!

As we left I couldn’t help thinking about all that we’d just seen and the shame that none of it was captured or preserved on film for the couple and their family.

Personally, I’m really glad I don’t follow wedding photography as a “style” – after all, who would want their wedding album just to look like everybody elses with the same poses and the same photographs (just different actors)? I think for Jo and Andy it was a real eye opener into the different photographic approaches that are taken at a wedding.

The feeling I was left with reminded me of Cartier Bresson talking about how he felt shooting on the streets of Marseille.
“I was determined to ‘trap’ life – to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

“I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.” Duane Michals

When I hold a camera in my hands (especially at a wedding), I’m often reminded by the shooting philosophies of Henri Cartier Bresson.

“Photography is not like painting” he told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

There were some really lovely moments at Julia and Nick’s wedding last Saturday. Here are some of my personal favourites.

Yes, yes, I admit it – I’m an unabashed fan of all things Apple. The new iPad is just amazing.

One absolutely fantastic application for the device is the Guardian Eyewitness app. The Guardian is one of those newspapers that takes photography seriously – with double page spreads featuring great news photographs regularly adorning the middle pages of the daily newspaper.

If you love photography and have an iPad, I recommend checking this out. It shows the power a still photograph still has in this day and age of moving televised news imagery. The pro tip and captions are wonderful to read and I can see myself enjoying this app for many months to come.

Here’s a couple of videos on the app itself. Highly recommended!