Wedding of the Week


Celebrating Heritage, By Eric Ronald

August 31, 2018

By Jacqueline Tobin

Photo © Eric Ronald Photography

Bride and groom Navishka and Staffan had the adventure of a lifetime during their nuptials and pre-wedding events, as did photographer Eric Ronald, including location shoots at an Elephant Orphanage and a Giraffe Center in Nairobi, and Hell’s Gate National Park in Kenya. Though the couple live in Hong Kong, says Ronald, bride Navishka is Indian and Kenyan, and she wanted something special that reflected where she and her family came from. “She was born in Nairobi with a lot of her family still there today, but grew up in Australia,” says the photographer. “so it was particularly important for Navishka and her family to celebrate their heritage with a Hindu ceremony in Kenya.”

All Photos © Eric Ronald Photography

“I hadn’t spent a lot of time photographing animals before, so this was something fairly new and exciting for me,” says Ronald. “As part of the wedding activities, there were group excursions to David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage and the Giraffe Centre. This presented a great opportunity for me to get up close and personal with these incredible creatures. Beforehand, I spent some time considering how I could best approach this to capture some beautiful photographs to enhance my story. The challenge was to achieve this alongside dozens of tourists and the keepers crowding the area. All of these things led me to having a very specific approach from the outset. Essentially, for the most part, I was looking for hard sunlight to hit my subjects up close for me to capture with my macro lens. The beauty of this from a lighting point of view is that you are essentially creating low-key lighting in a high-key environment. In doing this, I knew in the edit I could have given them a bit of a tickle to make them visually match the look of my getting-ready shots. Thus, these images, despite being totally different subjects and from totally different environments, could happily sit alongside each other for creative effect.”

Ronald says the Nairobi wedding venue itself was fully enclosed, fenced off with security guards. “It was stunning but didn’t look or feel like Africa. The biggest challenge in documenting this story for that reason was injecting Africa into the pictures. That led to two key decisions—getting photographs of landscape and wildlife on days other than the wedding day itself and the importance of doing a pre-wedding shoot with the couple. Given our schedules, we basically had a 24-hour window for the pre-shoot, so I did a bit of research on where we could go. Obviously, I was looking for beautiful wildlife and landscape, which quickly led me to Hell’s Gate National Park. Hell’s Gate has no dangerous predators, meaning you don’t need to be stuck in the confines of your car to avoid being eaten by a lion. Hell’s Gate also had a beautiful gorge and rather epic escarpments, which visually offered a whole lot more than regular flat savanna.”































“What made this story a success for me really came down to the two truly beautiful human beings who entrusted me with such an important task,” Ronald sums up. “It’s obviously very exciting going to exotic locations such as these, but our job is exactly the same as it is at home at those venues that we shoot at over and over again—that special love and connection between two people is one of the most magical things we can experience in life. As a wedding photographer, regardless of if we are home or away, it seems fitting to add a little magic to what we do. Even if there are giraffes and elephants, nothing will inspire that magic more than your perfect couple, and Navishka and Staffan were definitely that for me.”

The wedding album, says Ronald, was recently entered to be judged at the AIPP (Australian Institute of Professional Photography) APPAs, the Australian Professional Photography Awards. It’s covered in a zebra-patterned cow hide and placed within a custom-made timber shipping crate.

GEAR OF THE DAY

Cameras: Canon 5D Mark IV (x2)

Lenses: Canon 24mm f/1.4L, 45mm TS-E f/2.8, 50mm f/1.2L, 85mm f/1.2 L II, 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS

Lighting: Profoto A1

Drone: DJI Mavic Pro

Submit your wedding to Rf editor-in-chief Jacqueline Tobin for a chance to get featured here.