We spend a good deal of time talking to our wedding clients to try and discover what makes them and their wedding unique. We discovered that Lynne and Menno loved to bicycle together and that indeed they would be going on a six-week cycling tour for their honeymoon. So we knew we had to include bicycles in their wedding photography.

However, time was going to be limited after the ceremony and they loved the Gatineau Hills, so we decided that the bike shots would all be done before the ceremony at the MacKenzie King Estate. One of their friends had a tandem bike and was willing to lend it for the occasion. But how would we keep the bride's dress clean as we were shooting just a couple of hours prior to the ceremony? Their friends agreed to remove the chain and steam clean the bike to remove most of the risk, so things were a "Go for Gatineau".

The wedding was scheduled for 2:30 on a Friday afternoon so we agreed to meet in the parking lot at Kingsmere at 12:30. We arrived at 12:15, the tandem bike arrived at 12:25, but the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen. 12:45 then 1:00 o'clock came and went - still no couple. Finally at 1:10 they came running down a path, saying thay had parked in another lot and that their car's ignition would not shut off. They had left the car - still running - in the lot and had finally found us.

We did the shots of the biking and a few others around the grounds, then the couple who had brought the bike split up - one drove their car home to get changed for the wedding while the other drove the groom's car to a mechanic to get it shut off and fixed. This left us to drive the bride and groom to the church. So the portrait "Get me to the Church on Time" is aptly named for more reasons than one!

Technical Info: We needed to have the bike actually in motion to get the veil to flow out behind and to have the background and the spokes of the wheels blurred. However, the chain was removed for cleanliness, therefore the couple could do nothing but steer and stop. So we got the two of them mounted up and our helpers then gave them a good shove while Lianne held the veil up so it wouldn't get caught in the spokes. The blurred background effect was achieved by using a slow shutter speed (about 1/4 or 1/2 a second) and then panning the camera to keep them in the same spot in the viewfinder during the exposure. We needed to do this several times to be sure we got them in focus with good expressions.