_{Kauai Video Productions}

Oct 16th 2020 —

Kauai island  is open to visitors again—no quarantine! Wedding couples, elopers, vow renewers, you can once again travel to our island for that special day.  

With so many of us staying at home, watching/reading the news that is sometimes so disturbing that we can easily become fearful, doing something creative not only lifts the mind, it can be a breath of fresh air. Compiling a thematic photo album is a very creative endeavor. Going through your old videos, family, wedding, or just plain old goofy things you’ve filmed, and then editing a tight, well-paced video is another. I can help. I can use your photos that are a bit blurry or dark or just lack vibrance and invigorate them.  I can edit your videos.   Here’s a list of  the things I can help with.  

•Portrait Editing •Background removal •Family photography Editing •Wedding photography •Retouching •Color Correction •Photo Restoration  
 •Baby & Newborn Photography •Photo montage on video •Photo beautification •Video Editing

— David Marsh   

#conavirusKauai #covid19Kauai  

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 “The Day After” is a current trend in continuing wedding photography/ video.  For couples not immediately embarking on their honeymoon, choosing a second day is really rewarding; it’s like the day after Christmas—Boxing Day in many countries—where the celebration continues without the nerves and the  preparation. Couples get to be pampered by the paparazzi, or rather, a polite photographer/videographer. How many times in one’s life do you get to be on a media pedestal?  Furthermore,  think forward a bunch of years—when your kids see how wild you were, like when you leapt from a cliff fifty feet into the ocean in your wedding gown  or how you starred in your very own personal love story movie, like the one below.   What a cherished keepsake! For some couples, we incorporate scenes from the wedding day into the “Day After” movie, which, by the way, can be on a day or week or month before or after the wedding.  Call me or text me (David)at 808-278-8643 and let’s work on your Day After.  

The new iphone takes amazing 4K video, good enough for the big screen. Samsung also makes a fantastic media producing phone. So why should wedding couples hire a professional videographer when they can easily ask a friend or even their officiant to shoot video with the latest smartphone? 

There are actually a few reasons. Sound is one.   Tens of thousands of couples get married on our spectacular but blustery Kauai beaches annualy, thundering waves crashing ashore in the background. You’ll definitely hear the wind gusts and the ocean on that friend’s cell phone video. But you won’t hear your service; you won’t hear your vows. The professional videographer treats sound with utmost importance, using a pro audio system with lavalieres to record clean, close-up audio, so that you’ll be hear every word.  Professional sound is but one of the advantages of using a pro. Multiple cameras is another. The professional shoots simultaneous angles which adds dimensionality. And the pro’s bag of tools (stabilizers, sliders, video fluid heads) quickly distance her from the point-and-shoot enthusiast. She’s also savvy with the editing and knows she needs to deliver the edited video like yesterday.  A professional for your wedding video will likely be one of your best decisions for your destination wedding in Kauai. 

 Wedding Professional Series. Episode 1 “Officiants”  If you are having/ planning a wedding in Kauai, this video might be a valuable tool in your research, as you’ll see in action the best non-religious officiants on Kauai, ideal for elopement weddings, vow renewals, and events that require official services by a licensed officiant.      

 Diamond Light Photography

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As the day comes to a close, as the sun begins to hide its face and the moon begins to show its, as a warm ruddy glow shimmies atop the ocean's weary surface, it's the perfect time to take photos, forsaking brightly illuminated, definable faces in favor of silhouettes freckled with spangles of golden light.  — Silhouettes and Spangles 

Cold feet! You know what it is, right? In the months prior to the wedding it is apparently a common emotional experience. A UCLA survey determined that, at times, in flitting thoughts, 38% of engaged individuals feel some level of panicked uncertainty.  In some surveys the number is as high as 82% with a caveat— psychologists agree that it is quite normal. What I was hoping to learn in my research, however, is more than knowing who gets cold feet but a variant of the question; You’ve probably witnessed it in the movies. It’s the scene at the alter where the bride or groom realizes that their other half is not going to show. Maybe you’ve seen an even more dramatic version: the minister asks “Do you take X as your lawfully bla-bla-bla …” and we see the grimace of doubt, a horribly long pause, and suddenly he (groom) or she (bride) leaps off the podium and bolts for the exit.  So my question is, does this really happen in real life, and if so how often?  As a wedding photographer whose shot several hundred weddings, I’ve never witnessed anything close to it—at one wedding,  the bride arrived 3 hours late due to a complication and all the while the groom kept drinking. By the time the ceremony started he was so drunk he needed to be propped up and he slurred his “I do,” and later puked. I figured some have seen worse. So I began asking the question. For my research, I’ve interviewed Kauai’s best known wedding ministers and officiants.  

All indictions point to pastel hues like pistachio green, lavender, and butter yellow will be full blown in 2020 along with minimalist wedding dresses and edible flowers—at least that’s what websites like Weddingwire tell me. Specifically to my profession (photography and video) the overwhelming opinion is this: don’t get boxed in with fad because in 5 years when the bride looks at her wedding photos, chances are those “fad” colored filters will be old news. So the old fashioned brown look and muted colors (big on Instagram in 2019) might not be the best way to go. Admittedly, digital photos are easily modified, but if you’re going to be having a printed wedding album, it’s fodder for thought. 

A BIT WEIRD YET REAL WEDDING TRADITIONS 

When you get married in Hawaii, ukulele music might fill your ears, or maybe your musician will play the ukeke or maybe even the pahu. You’ll probably have a lei placed around your neck.  Leis are tokens of love and aloha. Grooms often wear a garland of green leaves (manly) rather than Kika or jasmine blossoms.  At the beginning of your ceremony, the conch might be blown, especially if it’s a beach elopement—a Hawaiian tradition that dates back to the time when the conch was blown to announce the arrival of Alii or Royalty.  Your officiant might smash open a coconut and spill the milk on the sand, and then ask you to rest your forehead on your partner’s forehead.  But you’re unlikely to experience a wedding tradition in Hawaii that will shock you. If your breath is taken away, it’s probably because you’re standing on the most dramatic beach you’ve ever seen, not because you’ve been punched in the gut for good luck or because your guests have suddenly gone berserk, yelling and laughing and banging and rattling pots and pans.  This pot banging business is an actual wedding ritual that was once commonplace in parts of Europe, especially in the middle ages. It’s still practiced today at some weddings. They call it Charivari in France, In Northern England, skimmington.  Family and friends gather outside the house of the newly weds and make pot-and-pan music or the din of a lifetime.  The wedding couple has to bring out food and drinks and endure the racket. 

How about this tradition: in some parts of Korea a groom can expect to be slapped about with a dead fish, apparently to prepare him for his first night of  marriage. The connotation is darn right unspeakable.  In Scotland, there’s the old Scots blackening ritual. Wedding gatherers throw all sorts of black and brown vile things at the couple before the wedding—if they can accept the disgusting, stinky mess they can endure anything.  Then there’s Chinese tears training — the bride-to-be spends a month before the wedding learning how to weep like a professional. They smash dishes in Germany and Swedes aren’t just noted for their meatballs, they’re known for kissing and spitting on the bride and groom—yup, a very Swedish thing, I’m told.   So if a young man places a whale’s tooth in your palm, I’m guessing that you’re a father, and the young man is asking for your daughter’s hand in marriage—a Fiji thing! 

If you know of other slightly strange wedding traditions, I’d love to hear from you—Mahalo— David.

 What your eyes see is not what a camera sees.  A camera approximates eyesight vision based on the photographer’s light and back focus settings. We call this the exposure—a term that is basically meaningless to our eyes. To our eyes, if it’s bright outside it’s bright; when it’s almost night, it’s dark. If we’re inside a candlelit room it probably looks moody, and when we’re sitting on the beach staring at the ocean as the sun sets it’s glorious and if we’re wise we won’t stare directly into the sun.  In photography, it’s not that straightforward.  Imagine it’s noontime and you’re in the middle of a sweeping grassy field fringed by lofty trees to your left and several dramatic gray clouds above.  I’m taking photos of you strolling along, the lofty trees sitting in shade are in the background. My camera's exposure settings would show you in the best light so that you don’t appear excessively underexposed or greatly overexposed. I could give you the photos right out of the camera and you might say, “Good enough; you love the pose, and you don’t need the photo edited.” But in the photo the sky is white and you cannot discern the dramatic cloud formations like you can with your eyes.  The lofty trees on your left are kind of dark without much detail, but, well, you can’t see much detail over there with your eyes anyway. So let me talk about editing. When I edit photos I work two tracks. The first track is basic editing. The second is creative. On the basic track, the first thing I do is adjust the photograph’s light, not as an overall photo adjustment,  which you could do yourself with just about any photo application, but in seperate areas of the photo. I typically increase light in the shadows, often bringing up more detail than your eyes could discern. I then reduce the exposure of the highlight areas, which might include a modification called dehazing, so the details of the clouds, so dramatic to your eyes, reappear. This might be all that’s required In basic editing. However, on some photos additional basic editing maybe required, such as straightening the photo’s horizon, cropping and or recomposing, maybe simple object removal. Then I move onto creative photo editing. This is a very time consuming process, but it’s an art that can elevate enormously the look of each photograph.  I might use image filters and matte techniques to add a mood or a particular theme if it’s appropriate for the photo sequence. Sometimes  I’ll stretch the photo’s background to make the image more dramatic, or I’ll replace the background. Sometimes I’ll move onto beautifying the subject/s by removing blemishes and wrinkles, dark rings and puffiness under the eyes, making thinner, younger, more energetic looking. Occasionally, I add rain or more rain than what shows in the natural photo. I might add lightning, stormy clouds or a shaft of sunlight streaming out of the clouds, or a flaming sunset entering the velvety blue ocean. I make composites. In the images below there’s a before the edit and after.  The before (top photo) shows that the day was bleak, rainy, a bit drab. In the second image you can see that I added warmth, a shaft of sunlight (left), and some subtle color to the sky. I got rid of the stick sticking out of the sand. I streched the background to the left and right of the couple making a more dramatic, wider photograph without altering the dimensions of the couple; in other words the second image is NOT a blow up. There was nothing wrong with the original shot. But the finished edited photo, that I also cropped at the bottom, is just so much better.     

 Destination Elope  I hour of coverage. See options

She walked slowly, her thin shoes not completely shielding her feet from the hot sand. She was nervous and excited in the same breath. Shore waves, about three feet tall, crashed along the shoreline, and misty sea-spray made her aubern hair glisten.  She took a deep breath, tasting the briny Pacific ocean elixir on her lips.  She squinted. There wasn’t a shipwreck in sight.  But she could see her man, faced away from her, waiting for her. Her heart began to beat even faster.

Not that I really knew what was going on in the bride’s mind at that moment; I just guessed.  I had been hired to capture these moments on video.  It’s a typical scene experienced by thousands of wedding couples at this particular beach: Shipwrecks Beach. My mind drifted and I wondered how many ‘shipwreck beaches’ are there? I know that in Greece there’s a Shipwreck Beach that some call Smuggler’s Cove. And I’ve heard that Oregon has a Shipwrecks beach, as does Washington State. In Hawaii there are at least two that I know of, the one at Lanai, aptly named Shipwrecks because it really does have mangled sea vessels littering its shore, and the one that I was on at that very moment: Shipwreck Beach, Poipu, Kauai. But here you wont actually find a shipwreck, not anywhere along the beach or along the spectacular coast. You will, however, see the iconic rock face—Makawehi Point—a sandstone landmark which the bride was presently heading to, and where her groom was waiting. You might have heard about this particular beach for another reason: This is where locals (and some brave tourists) leap thirty-five feet off the rock into the turbulent Pacific. Notably, Harrison Ford and Anne Heche jumped from it for the movie, “6 Days and 7 Nights.”  It’s just a short walk along the sand from the Hyatt Regency and other Poipu resorts, which might also be why so many wedding couples choose this location.  Waves smash again the cliff and when it’s really hot, wedding couples can move twenty feet from the water’s edge and find shade under the canopy of lush ironwood trees. It’s idyllic for dramatic photography and videography. The image below is pulled directly from the video, filmed by me at Shipwreck’s on November 11th 2019.

A footnote:  there used to be an old weather-beaten boat lying at the water’s edge. It sat there for many years, and that’s where the name, I guess, came from.

If you know of another Shipwrecks Beach, I’d love to hear about it. Shoot me an email at davidm617@me.com  

50 years and going strong! They’re from Irvine, California, and decided to repeat their vow at the Japanese Gardens, Kalaheao, Kauai.  To memoriaize the occassion, they chose the tripod video and photography package.  MORE

If you choose the tripod video, you’ll have your wedding video right after the ceremony on the SD camera card. Professionally shot, a wide angle view sometimes zoomed into a medium shot (as seen above). The audio is suberb, recorded with a lavalier microphone feeding the camera wirelessly. Select the tropod  video with the simple photo package and you’ll have photographs and video of your special occasion for just $500.  

I’m known for saying “there isn’t a bad photo-op place anywhere in Kauai.” It’s true. In fact, the perfect photo-op location is usually no more than a hundred yards away. Many years ago, in the middle of a very arduous film shoot, we found ourselves falling behind schedule. It was late afternoon and the entire crew had stopped off at the Princeville Center for some refreshments. We still had to get 3 shots in the can before nightfall or we’d fall behind schedule, and the shots needed to be in a jungle location. We’d chosen Kilauea but as I looked up from my water bottle my eyes fell on a banana bush next to a palm tree and some rough-trodden sugarcane grass. "Long lens. Tight shot. Jungle,” I said to myself. Sure enough, we shot the sequence right there, a stone’s throw from Foodland. You’d never know it when looking at the sequence in the movie. It was perfect. Dense unihabited jungle, thousands of miles from civilization.  The north shore has so many great areas for your photo session.  Beaches of course, but everyone expects that. I think the mountains are even more spectacular. And the forests are breathtaking. Here’s a few shots from my back yard, well, not exactly, but truly walking distance from my home.   

The film crane and its junior partner the jib arm are perhaps the most used film tools in professional film and television production. These styling tools elevate the look of the production.   It’s a must have for anyone desiring the very best look for their video.

Film tools add-on package $300
(includes) 

★ Operator/ grip for up to 2 hrs 
★  Jib arm - level plane low shots to above head. 
★ Video slider - for the finest short sliding motion
★ 3-axis video stablizer for buttery-smooth hand held shots. 

Looking off into the distance, thinking, imagining, wondering. Subtle but oh so good. 

Photographs by Kauai photographer David Marsh…

Are you a literary agent that represents YA authors? ? Do you know a literary agent that represents YA, well enough to call her/him on my behalf? If so, I’d be happy to talk to you about potentially doing your photography or video session at no charge. Put in another way: if you are able to get a lit agent to read one of my manuscripts, I will absolutely shoot your session at no charge. 

Email me at davidm617@me.com  — See David’s YA fiction HERE 

Sunset hour wedding with a quickie tripod video + photography. 

Sept 1st - the first couple to take advantage of my Fall special tripod video and photo package. 

Summer evening 2019 — a surprise proposal. Read the story HERE

Photography by David Marsh

Hanalei Bay, the pier, sunset hour, cloudy with gaps where the sun peaks through,  sprinkels on and off. In a word: spectacular.  

  Photographer: David Marsh, Kauai

A stunning blue wedding gown…it’s not everyday that we see a Kauai beach wedding where the bride wears a gown so beautifully different. I was lucky enough to film bride Lara in her stunning turquoise blue wedding gown. Mitchell, the groom, was stunned as he didn’t know about the gown. Just a quick note: These shots are video frames, pulled from the wedding video, as the photographer that day was the delightful Naomie.  

COMIC

Here are a few of the photographs from the “Love is in the air” photo shoot.  And see the video. Trust me. It’s good! For the photographs I though bright and colorful would be nice, rather than muted tones, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.

Not all weddings have to look the same. Kauai photographer Difraser. 

• Pre wedding cinematography -  when you want a wedding video that shows more than  your ceremony. It can mean communicating with your wedding cinematographer ahead of the big day, and discussing the types of scenes  you think might be great. This might be traditional type scenes, like getting ready, and guests arriving and or giving testimonials, and a montage of the reception.  Or it can mean something  completely and utterly different, like having the cinamtographer create a mini movie about your Kauai trip.    
• Pre wedding film ideas:  this can include themes for the video, such as romantic, adventurous, dangerous, going for laughs, or just about anything you can think of. It can even mean filming scenes that match the lyrics in a particular song.  
• Pre wedding photography - this is when you have specific ideas that you’d like to share with your photographer, to make sure that she / he includes the types of shots that you want in your wedding photography album / slideshow. 

Photography session:  September 27th 2017 — purpose - new website for the school. 

I’m in the shot ...

August 29th 2017 — So the day I got this new drone, my wife was worried that I'd do something silly, like try to piggy-back ride on it. Candidly, I’m not a complete novice. My other drone was almost as big as me, and it scared everyone who saw it, especially with me piloting.  So to appease the wife, we took a stroll. We could have just as easily been walking the dog, or the cat. We strolled, the drone kept pace, but after a while the drone begged to be cut loose.  

If you’re ready for the cinematic aerial look in your video, let me know.  Drone aerial photography/ videography adds a higher dimension to your story.   

Wedding videographer Kauai