The Indian Wedding

Last week I went to an Indian wedding.

I’m related to the groom – well, when I say related, the groom is my cousin’s husband’s cousin. With Indians, even your uncle’s wife’s cousin’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s cousin is considered a relative.

Bride and groom during the traditional ceremony:

I don’t really know the significance of many of the rituals that go on during the traditional part of Indian weddings. I don’t think anyone does really. I think the above shot was them just posing for shots though.

The food was lovely

An Indian wedding wouldn’t be complete without dancing

I wish the shot below had come out clearer – the two little girls are Angelisa and Tara.

I have no idea who these men are, but one of them came up to me and hugged me. I just smiled and pretended I knew who he was. That’s the other thing about Indian weddings – they’re so easy to gatecrash because no one actually knows who’s who.

Speaking of gatecrashing weddings, at one point a girl came up to me (well, she looked about my age) and said she was from another wedding next door and had noticed the music in this wedding, and was wondering if it was OK for her to come and dance with us. I said ‘sure’. She then told me she had never danced at a wedding before and was wondering if I could go up with her. I thought it was a tad strange but agreed. After a minute or so of awkward dancing, she said she didn’t know how to dance because she’d never been to this kind of event before :| I realised later that the wedding next door was a Muslim wedding. Music/dancing isn’t allowed there.

I was harrased by a shemale. Well, everyone called her a shemale.

She saw me taking a picture of her and winked at me, and held out her hand gesturing for me to dance with her. I thought I’d play along and took up her offer. She threw me around like a ragdoll. I was scared.

Angelisa is a cutie – she was the only one on the dancefloor at one point. I think she watches too many Bollywood movies though :P

Aww

C’est tout. :)

Dead rats

A few weeks ago, a bunch of photographers from DeviantArt met up here in London. We walked around taking pictures of wonderful things such as squishy dead rats on the bank of the Thames.

Lovely, eh? :D (I really don’t like the emotes on here)

We climbed to the top of Monument, and I surprised myself by only tripping up the stairs once – woo!

I liked this sticker, although I wish I’d used a lower F stop so the buildings in the background are more visible.

Back at the bottom of Monument, it was good to see a guy working with angles with his shots!

We got harrassed by a security guard near the London Eye who looked at our cameras and assumed we had professional gear (apparently size matters!). He told us we had to leave and couldn’t take pictures of the people queuing up (but apparently with a compact digi this would have been fine), which we weren’t really doing anyway. He was a funny-looking guy; I was tempted to take a shot of him but didn’t think that would go down too well.

: )

The Travel Photographer Of The Year Exhibition near the London Eye is pretty good. I liked this guy’s hair. He’s clearly an art student :P

This woman seemed lost in her own thoughts

This shot is not representative of the meet! It demonstrates my fantastic ability to make good times appear rubbish.

James touching up a roll of Apx 100

Brian took this shot of me using my Nikon EM, with Apx 100 film

I’ve finally finished that roll of film so I’ll be posting some of those pictures later.

It was great hanging out with other deviants – I hadn’t met most of the people there before, but it was a lovely experience, and I look forward to seeing many of them again.

:)