A tired body

Whew!
Yesterday we had a 15 hour wedding.
No lie, 15 hours.
It just about did me in. That is the longest I have ever shot and boy did it make it so sore. About 10 hours in my oh so comfy shoes decided that they didn't want to be comfortable any more. Apparently my feet swelled a good bit during the day and my pinky toe nail decided it wanted to cut into the toe next to it. Not a good idea little toe.
It was a great wedding, one of the best we have shot to date (well I would hope that every wedding we do is always better then the previous one). The family was awesome and the bride and groom were fabulous together.

It was great to see the community that surrounded the bride and groom on their wedding day. Friend from both families came to help and serve the couple on their special day. The couple got ready at the bride's parents house and no less then 20 women were there to serve. At one point all the women gathered around the bride and prayed for her as she started out her new home. Unknown to me at that time, the men were doing the same for the groom in a separate part of the house. Philip and Ben were able to participate in the gathering of the men.
Something that I really loved about the wedding was the inclusion of many Jewish traditions in the ceremony (the bride's father's family is Jewish) . Philip and I included several Jewish traditions in our wedding and I wish we had done more. The couple made sure to give a detailed list of all the traditions in the program for the guest to have.

My favorite tradition included was the dancing of the horah. This dance goes on for 45 minutes straight and boy is it fun. After about 15 minutes of photographing the dance I handed over my camera to Ben and I jumped in on the fun. I got really excited when the bride mentioned in our prewedding meeting that they would be dancing the horah and she told me not to be shy and get in. So I did. It was so much fun! But I am so out of shape! It is a very fast paced dance and 30 minutes of that wore me out! I was so out of breath when it finished. Once you are in the dance it is really really hard to get out because it is danced in a circle with multiple cirlces being built outside the main circle. If you are in the middle, you have to stay for the whole time.
I also got in on some of the "club" dancing that happened later in the night. Philip made sure to document that. I'll be sure to post those images when I find them in all the other images.

I started downloading the card from last night at 9 this morning. I finished downloading cards at 4 this afternoon! That translates to 50gb of cards and 4300 images. Yep the most we have ever taken in one day. When you have three people shooting for 15 hours, you take a lot of images. I hope to get it down to 800 final images to present to the couple. I hope I can weed it down that far.

But now I am resting. I stayed in bed until 1 this afternoon (well getting up occasionally to check on the card downloading progress) and had Philip pick up Pei Wei for lunch for us. I feel a little lazy but I know that my body needs the rest. Every muscle in my body aches. Even my toe nails hurt. I think that I will finally break down and get a massage this week. There are some knots in my back that I really need to get worked out so I can sleep better.

Philip was such a trooper yesterday. He has been sick all week and pretty tired from grad school but he didn't complain at all about the long day. I knew he would be exhausted at the end and would have to get up and be at chrch at 7:45 for run through. Without complaining he work really hard along side me and didn't complain at all this morning when the alarm went off way to early. He is such a great husband. Here I am still sitting in my pjs and he jsut left again for to play at church. It is nice to see him not getting upset with me when I get to rest and he doesn't. Instead he makes sure that rest and don't work at all on days after weddings. I am so blessed by him...

Now to finish chilling for the day.