Posts Tagged ‘traditions’
Great Tips For Beautiful Wedding Videos
The most important tip for anyone shooting wedding videos is to put in a lot of practice before hand. Spend time learning to use your video camera and equipment. Use the rewind, forward, pause and record features and get used to how they work. About one to two months before the wedding day practice with focusing in and out and also panning around an area or crowd easily without shakiness. The key to great video is to have a very steady hand.
It is a great idea to visit and get familiar with the places where the wedding is to be held and the reception afterwards. Get ideas for places you will be able to stand and get the prime shots of the ceremony, party, reception and more.
Let the photographer do their job uninterrupted, this means stay out of their shots and poses and do not bother them while they are snapping shots. It would be very bad if they took a great shot only to find you and your equipment in it. The moments to be captured on video should be some of the couples most romantic and cherished ones. The bride and her father as he walks her down the aisle and hands her to the groom as well as the vows being taken.
Get video of all the bride’s maids and other wedding party people as they descend down the aisle also. Make sure to capture the father giving the bride to her beloved and the complete ceremony from start to finish.
The kiss of the couple right after they say their I dos is a must for any video of their day. Be sure to get in close for this shot. You should also get them going down the aisle hand in hand headed to the reception too.
The cutting of and the feeding each other wedding cake is a long held tradition and should always be captured as the bride and grooms toast should be too. Bouquet catching is a prime shot too.
Ask close family and friends to make a statement or comment to the happy couple on this most special of days. They can look back on these in the future with fondness and love.
As the videographer you should know how to put in add ins such as music in some of the video background as well as color effects if asked for by the couple. You do not want their most memorable day looking like a cheaply made home movie.
If all of your filming is to be done inside then you may have to invest in equipment for lighting to keep the shots accurately lit and exposure at its best throughout the entire taping.
If sound of the couple saying their vows is an issue then place a tie microphone onto the grooms tie itself. This allows all the words they say to one another in love to be heard clearly and concisely without background interference.
Talk to the couple ahead of time and ask them if there is any special requests for Toronto wedding videos of certain aspects of their day they wish to include. Write these down and keep with you, refer back too throughout the ceremony and reception.
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Will These Wine Glasses Do?
The growing trend of popularity of wine has led to a boom in things to go with wine like corkscrews, stoppers, coolers, napkins, pouring baskets, decanters, candles, thermometers, bottle jackets, hydrometers and dozens of varieties of each accessory from electric versions to manual ones. Needless to say, a lot of these accessories will be used until the novelty wears off and then left at the back of the cupboard.
However, there is one category of wine drinking accessory that no wine drinker should be without and that is wine glasses. They are indispensable, I am sure that everyone would agree. But the good thing about wine glasses is that they are decorative when they are not in use too. A set of six lead crystal wine glasses is a fine-looking sight. And a fine set of glasses correctly shaped for the wine you are drinking will greatly enhance your enjoyment of that wine.
This is because the shape of the glass is very influential on the drinker’s capacity to savour the taste and the aroma of wine. Therefore, it is necessary to use the correct glasses for the type of wine being served.
Red wines gain a lot from contact with air, so, aside from opening the bottle an hour before drinking it, you could decant it. The older and heavier the wine, the more air it must have. The next step is to serve the red wine in large glasses. This is not so as to be able to get as much wine in there as possible! A full, normal size bottle contains six servings no matter what glass you use, but a large glass allows you to swirl the wine around the glass, thereby increasing its contact with air.
A large tulip shaped glass is a good example of this kind of wine glass and any dark red wine would benefit from being drunk out of such a vessel. Try a Rioja or Bordeaux, for instance.
White wines, on the other hand, do not need to breathe for as long as red wines and are best served slightly chilled. Therefore, the wine glasses tend to have a smaller bowl and a longer stem. The bowl is smaller, because swirling is not essential and the stem is longer, so that the warmth from your hand does not warm the wine up prematurely. Try a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon or a German wine in these glasses.
Champagne glasses are called champagne flutes because the bowl is long and narrow, which allows the bubbles to float through more of the wine than if the bowl were short. This is beneficial for the wine, the taste and its appearance. The stem is also long as with other white wines to diminish heat transfer.
The last main kind of glass is the sherry schooner, which is also used for port. Sherry and port are both heavy reds and so need to breathe, which is one of the reasons why they should be decanted. However, a schooner has hardly any stem, because the warmth from your hand is required to keep the wine at the correct temperature.
Apart from the shape of the bowl and the length of the stem, the next most significant factor is the quality of the glass and its design. Some people like hand-blown glass and it can be very beautiful, but it also tends to be light and delicate. I prefer to use lead crystal glasses, which are a lot heavier and can take a deeper pattern.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Waterford crystal vases. If you have an interest in Irish crystal or wedding rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring
Choose Your Wedding Ring Wisely
There is a very large number of wedding rings available in the shops these days. In fact, you have the world of wedding rings to choose from. The high street shops in a large town have a very good selection, but the Internet lays the best jewellers and the best styles out for your inspection.
So, it is very important that you take your time when selecting one. Maybe the enormous assortment of wedding rings makes that more difficult not easier. Diamond wedding rings have been the most popular since ordinary working people could afford them, before that a plain band of gold had to be enough, for people who could afford that much.
Nowadays, Western people have become more adventurous and they are choosing other stones like the stunningly beautiful blue sapphire. Some even deciding not to have a stone at all, going back to tradition, so to speak. However, there are plenty of examples of not so simple bands of gold too.
There is the Irish Claddagh ring with its characteristic two hands holding a crowned heart symbolizing love, friendship and loyalty; and there is the Celtic Knot with its intricately interwoven strands twisting and turning without end, standing for eternity and eternal love despite the twists and turns and difficulties of daily life.
So, selecting a wedding ring is not just a question of picking a beautiful wedding ring, you should be picking one that says what you want it to say. You could look up on the Internet what the different metals and various stones indicate traditionally. If you cannot find a ring that says what you want, consider having one made. It is not as expensive as you might think.
Tradition is a good thing when it comes to wedding rings. After all, you want your ring to express your eternal love and devotion for the person you are giving it to and your marriage could last fifty or sixty years, especially with people living longer these days. Hopefully, you will wear this ring for the rest of your life, so select a style that seems timeless to you.
Picking a wedding ring is not as straightforward as it looks, because you are going to be wearing your ring every day for the rest of your life, so it should be something that you will not get tired of in a couple years. You should look at and try on many rings in order to get one that feels comfortable. You will want a ring that does not look out of date in ten years time. The simplest method of doing that is to go for a traditional style, because those styles have already stood the test of time.
One last piece of advice is to ask the jeweller to verify the total carat weight of the stones in the ring and the weight of each individual stone and the quality and weight of the metal (although it should be hallmarked) on paper, then if it gets lost or stolen you have something to show the insurance company.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with the Celtic knot wedding ring. If you have an interest in gold rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring
The Growth of California and Gold Fever
In January 1848, James Marshall was overseeing the building of a saw mill for his employer, when he noticed an odd rock glinting in the upturned soil.
He was not sure whether it was gold or not and did not want to get people’s aspirations up. So Marshall attempted to break the yellow rock with a hammer. It did not crack, but it did dent. just like gold would. The woman who was cooking meals for the saw mill construction crew, tried another test by boiling the rock in lye.
They boiled it all day, but it did not change colour. So, they passed the rock over to the mill’s owner, Mr. John Sutter, who also conducted a few tests. Eventually, everyone agreed that this rock was indeed gold.
It seems that the Sierra Nevada Mountains held huge stores of gold, but that over tens of thousands of years, erosion had loosened up gold nuggets and the mountain streams washed them down to the base of the mountains. Sutter’s property was situated between two rivers and so was expected to generate great wealth.
Sutter had plans to build an agricultural empire on his 39,000 acres of land, so he asked his employees to keep stum about the strike. However, as is to be anticipated, word leaked out. Eventually news of the gold strike reached the small town of San Francisco.
There, a newspaper publisher shouted down the streets: “Gold from the American River!” and within three days of the news arriving, 400 of the 600 inhabitants had set out for Sutter’s land. It was a groundswell and by the end of the year, gold prospectors had traveled to California from as far away as Mexico and Chile.
When word of the gold strike got to the east coast, President Polk confirmed the finding. It was December 1848 and ‘The Gold Rush’ became a national and even a worldwide phenomenon. The gold miners of 1849 and later years became known as forty-niners.
What has to be borne in mind is though, that most people, who came from Canada, Mexico and the eastern United States came by wagon train, as there were not locomotive! This meant a arduous trek of between six and nine months
Nevertheless, at least 32,000 people actually walked to California in 1849, and about 44,000 more got there in 1850. Others, such as South Americans, faced an arduous journey by sea. They suffered storms, shipwrecks, hunger and thirst, disease, and overcrowding and after all that, some still had to face mule rides through jungles and deserts! Still, in under a year, about 40,000 people arrived in San Francisco from abroad.
The new arrivals constituted a dramatic change in California’s population, because in 1848, California had had about 100,000 residents, most of whom were Native Americans, but within two years, the state populace more than doubled but the variety of ethnicity increased tens of times.
Some people found gold and made a lot of money in the Californian riverbeds, but most people did not become rich in the Gold Rush. When gold was found, the cache was usually cleared quickly. James Marshall had little success as a miner, and he died on the breadline. John Sutter, who had once owned 39,000 acres, left California in serious debt after miners flattened his land.
In fact, it was simpler to make money selling spades and other provisions to the prospectors. Most people lost everything they had, so they stayed to farm the vast expanse called California or to set up businesses. By 1856, San Francisco had a very cosmopolitan population of over 50,000 people and California had become the most exhilarating state in the nation.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Celtic knot rings. If you have an interest in gold rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring
Celtic Wedding Traditions
Celtic wedding are an ideal way of showing your being a Celt. It is also a way of incorporating traditional values, symbols, themes and customs into major events in your life. However, Celtic wedding are hugely popular not only among people with a Celtic tradition, but among other couples who are taken by the ancient Celtic culture.
Celtic wedding have traditional symbolic motifs, often based on the Celtic knot. Welsh, Irish and Scottish families will sometimes marry in ancient buildings like castles or old manors, but that is not the standard. A traditional Celtic wedding is not greatly different from a normal British wedding in a lot of ways.
However, the number of similarities between Celtic wedding traditions and normal British-style weddings goes a lot further than that. If you want a traditional British style wedding, you will be going unsuspectingly for a Celtic wedding. But you can beef up the Celtic element of the wedding ceremony even further without sinking into silly theatrics.
This is a traditional Celtic poem about when to marry:
Marry when the year is new, Always loving, kind and true.
When February birds do mate, You may wed, nor dread your fate.
If you wed when March winds blow, Joy and sorrow both you’ll know.
Marry in April when you can, Joy for maiden and for man.
Marry in the month of May, You will surely rue the day.
Marry when June roses blow, Over land and sea you’ll go.
They who in July do wed, Must labour always for their bread.
Whoever wed in August be, Many a change are sure to see.
Marry in September’s shine, Your living will be rich and fine.
If in October you do marry, Love will come but riches tarry.
If you wed in bleak November, Only joy will come, remember.
When December’s showers fall fast, Marry and true love will last.
Here are a few other traditions:
Loving Cup: The traditional cup is a two-handled bowl with Celtic designs engraved onto it. The idea of the Loving Cup ceremony is for the bride and groom to share their first drink together as husband and wife and to demonstrate the coming together of their two families.
The Bell of Truce: A bell is blessed and then presented to the bride and groom. The couple is required to ring the bell, while thinking loving thoughts of each other. The bell is then kept at home as a reminder of the wedding day. If an argument begins, the bell can be rung by either the husband or wife to call a truce. The tinkling sound is meant to remind the couple of their wedding vows and to help them relive happy memories from their wedding day.
Handfasting: Early Celts used to ?tie the knot?. It dates back to a pre-Christian custom of literally tying a couple’s wrists together in a form of probationary marriage lasting a year and a day, at the end of which a new agreement was made or the couple parted ways.
Bride’s Bouquet: In Celtic wedding traditions brides carried herbs beneath their veils to signify fidelity, and spices to frighten off evil spirits.
Ring finger: Ancient Celts thought that there was a vein in the third finger of the left hand that ran directly to the heart, so ring placed on that finger demonstrated a strong love and vow to the other.
Wedding cake: A thin loaf was cracked over the bride’s head at the end of the service to indicate fertility. The wheat from which it was made symbolized fertility and the guests readily picked up the pieces for good luck charms.
It was also common for the Celtic groom to toss a handful of coins into the crowd after the wedding, in the belief that this would bring them luck in the years ahead.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with theCeltic Knot wedding ring. If you have an interest in wedding rings too, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring