I got the wedding prints back. Some few of them were good, most of them were OK and a lot of them were best never printed. No complaints, about par for the course. In looking them over I can find lots of things to shoot differently the next time, if there is a next time. Since there was no professional photographer at this wedding, I ended up shooting a bunch of standard bride-groom together looking wistfully into one another's eyes holding hands under the flowered arch with cherubic flower girls in the background shots, the kind that real wedding photographers can do in their sleep, what they get paid to do in their sleep. Mine just look like I was asleep.

Not my gig, I might say, I like to shoot close up candids of people's faces, the closer the better, but I think I'd better read a book about wedding photography just in case I'm ever tempted to try this again. And I will be tempted and I will say yes because I am a photography slut and although the people I know hardly ever get married anymore, some of them do, and some of them will, and some of them will need a cheap photographer like me.

I've said I'd like to do portraits. Well, these are sort of like portraits, are they not? They have little or no respect, wedding photographers, the faceless sweat shop grinders of the photography trade, but they do shoot portraits of a kind and maybe they're a kind I might like to shoot. Better than that bullets in the trenches war photography crap. (I'm hallucinating here, too old for wars and way too crazy for weddings. There must be an in between.) There are no categories, I guess, just photographs; there are no rules other than respect and, you know, even respect has its detractors.