Cape Town Wedding Photographer | Eric Uys | Blog » Artistic Wedding Photographer based in Cape Town

Julia + DK = Hitched

Julia and DK (the artist formerly known as De Klerk) had great weather on their wedding day in March. I just came back from Las Vegas and I was feeling a bit under the weather but it was such a great event and everyone was is such a happy mood it lifted my spirits and soon I forgot about my woes and I really enjoyed the laughs and the small intimate wedding which was held at her family house. The dance floor was literally held up with a boards and nails right over a swimming pool! Alas the carpentry held up very well and I did not get to capture and splish splashing:)Please enjoy!

(It was very difficult to pick a few random photos for the post as there were so many great moments) Makeup by Sanmarie Botha

April 17, 2013 - 01:09

Eric - Thanks Shireen

April 17, 2013 - 01:08

Eric - Dankie Giz! altyd lekker om samet julle te kuier :)

April 17, 2013 - 01:08

Eric - Thank you Julia, everyone was great, it made my job so easy and enjoyable and that translates into way better awesome photography. Now to take over the world!

April 16, 2013 - 18:57

Giz - One of the best weddings I’ve been to!

Love your photography Eric! You make it so easy to relive the memories!!!

Gorgeous! Amazing! Beautiful!

April 16, 2013 - 18:44

Jean-Pierre Uys - So much life and emotion captured!

April 16, 2013 - 17:20

Cape Town Wedding Photographer - Love dit!! Well done

April 16, 2013 - 17:12

Julia - Eric, I absolutely love these. They capture the evening so beautifully and are an absolute joy to look at.

Thank you so much for immortalising our wedding, and being a part of it.
(Which other photographer ends the night with running man on the dance floor?!)

Jeannine + Rene = Married!

Jeannine and Rene got married at Langverwacht Estate next to Zevenwacht in March this year. He is the man from Amsterdam and she is from Cape Town. Ok maybe not really Amsterdam but it sounded cool, enjoy the photos! It also needs to be mentioned that it was one hell of a hot day, probably close to 35 degrees Celcius at some stage in the shade. The flowers, sadly did not make it, RIP.

Bianca + Grant = Married

Bianca and Grant tied the knot early one morning on a Saturday in February, the 16th that is. Morgenhof Estate was the venue for the ceremony and the reception. I just need to remind people how incredibly hot it was that day, it was probably close to 35 degrees Celsius! Needless to say it was a bit of a challenge to shoot portraits in the middle of the day in that heat but I think we managed to get some good ones:)Enjoy the photos.

Doesn’t Grant look just a little like Dexter Morgan? And wait, they got married at Morgenshof.. The plot thickens:)Congratulations you two! Oh and Grant we still need to shoot that car of yours!

VIVA Las Vegas!

Yes that’s right! Las Vegas! So I had the pleasure of visiting the States a couple of weeks ago and on my very first trip ended up in Las Vegas of all places. I know, can you believe it?! Am I crazy or what? Not entirely:)

See there was a convention there called the WPPI. The largest of it’s kind, an International Wedding and Portrait Photographer Expo and Convention. There were close to 16,000 attendees this year, held at the magnificient MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. My facebook page has lots of pics from the expo itself, I will be putting up more of my own personal snaps I took while walking around (and did I walk! Probably close to 6km’s a day, which is way over my daily walkable budget)

It was an incredible experience in a massive place. One truly feels small and a good pair of comfortable shoes is essential, forget about being too snazzy, your feet will die. There was another reason I went to Vegas and that was to support my brother, Jean-Pierre, he had been nominated by the Framed Awards as one of the top 10 Wedding Photographers in the World, what an honor! I met the most awesome people while I was there, Kristi Sutton Elias, Corinne Alavekios, Jerry Ghionis, Jose Villa, Jonas Peterson, Benjamin Von Wong, Gregory Georges, Elizabeth Messina, Christy Weber, Blair DeLaubenfels and an artist from San Diego Kathryn Williams to name a few. So great to meet you all!

You can see some more from the WPPI here. You can see more of the Framed awards here.

The glorious MGM Grand Hotel.
Yes, there another lady in Vegas holding up the flame of liberty
A view of the good ol strip.
Yes we stayed at the castle, its big.
If I remember correctly this was shot in the bus, just came out great:)
Yes that is a Chewbacca standing in the streets of Vegas.
Oh right, it was also Nascar week in Vegas! The place was packed with people. Just 300 000 people came down for Nascar.
Sad to have missed the water works show at the Bellagio
There be pirates, arrrrh!
I SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THOSE BOOTS DAMMIT!
An bike from OCC
This was at The Luxor, (the pyramid shaped hotel) and the girls dance inbetween the poker and black jack tables, for tips. Or so I hear.
Yep that’s me and my brother:)

Brand new website

I have been busy working a new website and here it is – ericuysphotography.com – please go have a look as it is basically just a showcase of some of my best work or at least some of the work, I have had time to edit and select. It is such a labour intensive task and such a difficult but neccessary task that all photographer have to go through, I find it very difficult to cull my images so this process takes me ages!

Smita + Akshay = Married – Indian style

It was last year December a day before Christmas that my brother and I shot this gorgeously extravagant Indian Wedding in Durban. At almost 800 guests it was a truly massive event to cover, even for two photographers as experienced as my brother and I, that’s why the couple from Custophoto helped us out for a bit during the reception. The entire wedding took place at the beautiful Durban Convention Centre next to the Hilton hotel where we stayed. I really don’t know why it’s taken me this long to blog this beautiful fantastical Bollywood Wedding. Enjoy!

December 5, 2012 - 23:32

Eric - Baie dankie Guarev!

November 29, 2012 - 10:41

Gaurav Singh - WOW. what a wedding! die images is sublime eric, mal oor die blou bokeh van die stage se liggies, regtig amazing imagery!

September 26, 2012 - 11:19

Eric - Dankie Nastassja!

September 26, 2012 - 11:16

Eric - dankie Lulu :)

September 17, 2012 - 21:53

nastassja harvey - WOW. what a wedding! die images is sublime eric, mal oor die blou bokeh van die stage se liggies, regtig amazing imagery!

September 4, 2012 - 13:16

Lulu du Plessis - This is absolutely gorgeous! This show what a phenomenal good photographer you are. Many blessings on your work.

August 22, 2012 - 00:42

Eric - Thank you for the kind words Smita! Means a great to deal to hear them. I might have a solution for your problem, multiple albums :) I totally know what you mean though, I find it very difficult to edit the photos down to a selection, must be why it took so long to post these!

August 21, 2012 - 14:17

Smita & Akshay - Thank you Eric!!! These breath-takingly creative pictures bring back such beautiful memories for us – we can not thank you enough. Although you must know, these pictures made life very difficult for us when it came to choosing for the album! Every single one was unique and so stunning, it broke our heart to have to only chose a few. But thank you again, not just for these lifelong memories but for sacrificing your time and holidays to be part of our special day. Much love always… Smita & Akshay

Nikon D3 vs D800 lens tests

So I noticed something that bothered me tremendously while shooting with my D800. My trusty 24 – 70mm f2.8 lens was doing something funny. It was sharp in the middle and very soft at the edges with yellow and blue finging. My heart stopped, I fainted and awoke in the ER. After several hours of bypass surgery and nanosurgery on my brain it was discovered that I merely fainted from gross disappointment. now I have to walk around assisted by a bionic implant and my left eye sees everything in inverted colors, either that or the pain medication is quite something.

I know that I am spewing senseless nonsensical garbage now but I it really conveys my sadness at the situation. My most favorite and used lens, not to mention third most expensive (especially for a poor third world rated photographer). So I decided to test it against my D3 and find out if maybe it was only a D800 resolution problem. Not being able to find anything suitable to test it on and still no models showing up at my door to test with I decided to create my own test chart, you can download it from here.

Setup was to shoot at ISO 100 (been longing to do that with a Nikon for years now! thanks) unfortunately the D3 still sucks at anything below ISO 200 so I stuck to that setting. Shooting at the widest aperture first. All at a parallel plane to the lens, directly in the centre. All is not lost though, the lens does retain some form sharpness but only at f8 and upwards and it seems at it’s sharpest around f11 to f16. Not too bad for landscape shots but not very sharp at the edges. Definitely less color aberration than at f2.8 and f5.6 Not really as sharp all the way through as the 70 – 200mm f2.8 VRII lens, that thing is obsidianly sharp at f2.8 through to f5.6 from the centre to the edge of the image, yummy! (“Obsidianly” is a word of my invention, after the obsidian blades that were used by early man, created from shards of splintered volcanic glass/rock that are 1000x times sharper than surgical scalpels)

Back to the 24-70mm lens. I did a full range of focal length tests (from 24mm to 70mm) as well and saw that the lens was worst, the wider the focal range so I decided for this blog post to keep it at 70mm and some at 50mm as that would be the lens’s best optical range and any errors there would translate worse the wider you went. Wow that was a mouthful. Wunderbar. The most interesting thing I noticed which also delighted me was that the lens sharpness was the same on both cameras. I am so very relieved about that discovery. All the lenses did pretty much the same thing on both cameras so I am not going to waste my bandwidth limitations by posting samples from both cameras, just from the Nikon D800.

I will now provide you with full res downloads if you really want to see it for yourself (files are between 4mb and 6mb in size)
Shot with at the following settings: 24-70mm f2.8 160th at 70mm, 24-70mm f5.6 160th at 70mm, 24-70mm f8 160th at 70mm and 24-70mm f16 160th at 70mm
Here is a sample from the 70 – 200m f2.8 lens for comparison.

The results were the same when I did the test with my D3 and as you can see for yourself, the lens is much sharper at f16 but still not as sharp as the 70 – 200mm VRII at f2.8! The results were even sharper at f5.6 With the 24 – 70mm, the closer to the edge of the frame you get, the more visible the blue and yellow fringing is and this was the same when tested on the Nikon D3 so the D800 can not be at fault here for having a resolution that the 24 – 70mm lens cant handle.

While we are on the subject of resolution, some of you might think: Well if the lenses perform the same, why not just upscale a D3 image to the same size as a D800 image? So I tested that as well, and yes I was astonished at first. When upscaled, the D3 (this should be the same even with a Nikon D700 camera) image looks pretty darn close to that of the D800. But let’s take it further, let’s upscale them both even more, by 200% to a whopping 144MB image

This is the full image and below is a cropped version. The D3 file was first up-scaled to match the D800, then both of them were up-scaled another 200% and this is a cropped and resized version to show the detail.

There is a definite amount of detail superiority as shown by the D800. I hope this was informative. Cheers! Have a look here at my review of the D800

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