The Nikkor 200mm f/2 weighs 2.9 kilograms. Nearly six and a half pounds. It is roughly the size of a large thermos and costs more than most people's first camera setup. It is, by any rational accounting, an absurd lens to bring to a wedding.
I brought it to every wedding I shot for the better part of a decade.
I stopped shooting weddings in 2020. The reasons aligned the way good decisions usually do — not in a single dramatic moment, but in a convergence of things that, taken together, were too clear to argue with. COVID cleared my calendar for me. My daughter Claire was born. And somewhere in the quiet of those months, I understood that the trade I'd been making — my weekends for other people's memories — had stopped making sense for our family.
This is the longer version of why. And what I miss.
The Nikon D4s or D5 with the 200mm f/2 mounted — on the camera bag or a table, lens cap off. Let the size of the lens tell the story. This is the setup that went to every wedding for ten years.
What the 200mm f/2 Actually Does
Before the story, a quick detour into the physics, because it explains everything about my aesthetic.
An f/2 aperture on a 200mm lens means the opening through which light enters is 100 millimeters across — nearly four inches. That is a large hole. And a large aperture, combined with a long focal length, produces an extremely shallow depth of field: at typical portrait distances, only a few inches of the scene are in sharp focus at any given moment. The eyes are sharp. The tip of the nose begins to soften. The ears are already gone.
What this means in practice: the background dissolves. Not blurs in an ugly way, but dissolves — becomes color and light and suggestion, completely separated from the subject. The technical term for the quality of that out-of-focus rendering is bokeh, from the Japanese word for haze or blur. The 200mm f/2 produces some of the most beautiful bokeh of any lens ever made, because its nine rounded aperture blades render out-of-focus light sources as nearly perfect circles, and its optical design handles the transition from sharp to soft with unusual smoothness.
What I was actually doing with it: I was designing space. I was deciding what existed in a photograph and what didn't. The background — the reception hall decor, the other guests, the parking lot — ceased to exist. The subject — two people, one moment — became the entire world of the frame.
The 200mm f/2 signature — a couple portrait where the subject is razor sharp and the background is completely dissolved into soft color. This is what the lens does that nothing else does quite the same way. Pick your best example from the wedding archive.
What Architecture Taught Me About Seeing
My background is architecture. Before I shot a single wedding, I spent years learning to read space — to understand a building not as walls and rooms but as a system of relationships. Foreground, middle ground, background. Compression and release. The way light enters a space and what it does when it gets there. The hierarchy of elements: what is essential, what is supporting, what should disappear.
This translates to photography in ways that are hard to teach but immediately visible in the results. A good photograph, like a good building, is about editing. Every frame is a decision about what to include and what to leave out. The difference between a mediocre photograph and a compelling one taken at the same wedding, in the same light, of the same people, is almost always about what the photographer chose not to show.
Architecture also trained my eye for geometry — the relationship between a person and the space they occupy, the way a window frame or an archway or a staircase can become a compositional structure that organizes a portrait without announcing itself. I was not looking for pretty backdrops. I was looking for spaces that had structural logic. A couple standing in a doorway isn't a cliché if you understand what the doorway is doing to the light and the geometry of the frame.
I shot only prime lenses — fixed focal lengths, no zooming. The 200mm f/2 was the primary tool. A 35mm f/1.4 for tighter spaces and details. A 85mm f/1.4 for the in-between. The constraint of a prime lens is the point: it forces you to move. You can't zoom your way into a better composition. You have to walk. You have to commit. The discipline of fixed glass, after a few years, becomes a kind of instinct — you stop thinking about focal lengths and start thinking only about what you're seeing.
The Places
Destination weddings are the reason anyone in their right mind endures the physical demands of wedding photography. You are being paid to be somewhere extraordinary.
Dominican Republic — the beach ceremony, tropical light, open sky. Pick the frame where the 200mm compression is most visible — the ocean flattened behind them, the couple close and sharp.
The Dominican Republic was the furthest I traveled. Beach ceremony, tropical light that arrives golden and stays golden longer than you expect, the ocean as a backdrop that the 200mm compressed into a solid wall of blue-green. The logistics of traveling internationally with two camera bodies and four prime lenses, each in its own padded case, teach you quickly what is truly essential gear and what you've been carrying out of habit.
Mendocino, California is about as far as you can get from a tropical beach and still be shooting a wedding outdoors. The northern California coast in that area is dramatic in a way that earns the word: cliffs that drop to the Pacific, wind that means everyone's hair is always doing something, light that goes from soft to hard to golden in the span of an afternoon. I shot a wedding there at a private estate on the headlands. I remember standing at the cliff edge during the portrait session, the 200mm hunting for focus in the wind, thinking that this was the kind of place where you couldn't take a bad photograph even if you tried.
Mendocino — the headlands, the cliffs, the Pacific. Couple at the edge with the ocean behind. If you have a shot where the wind is visible in the image — in hair, in fabric — that's the one.
The Painted Hills in Oregon are one of those places that look like they were invented for photography and then somehow turned out to be real. The hills are ancient volcanic ash deposits, layered in bands of red, gold, black, and green that change color as the light changes. I shot a wedding there that required the couple to hike about a mile to the portrait location in their wedding clothes. They didn't complain. When you're standing in those hills, complaining feels beside the point.
Painted Hills, Oregon — the couple against the layered red and gold hills. Wide enough to show the landscape scale, close enough to see their faces. The color banding in the hills should be the dominant visual element behind them.
San Diego for the quality of its light — southern California in the afternoon is a different thing than anywhere else, a warmth and softness that makes the 200mm's color rendering look like it was calibrated specifically for that latitude. Toronto for the architecture: a city that has enough visual structure to build interesting frames around a couple without the background competing with them.
What a Wedding Weekend Actually Costs
Here is the thing nobody tells you about being a serious wedding photographer: it takes the whole weekend. Not just Saturday. The whole weekend.
Friday: travel if it's a destination, setup and walkthrough if it's local, sometimes a rehearsal dinner. Saturday: you arrive before the bride starts getting ready, sometimes 7am, and you leave after the last dance, sometimes midnight. Sunday: you are useless. Your feet hurt, your back is done, your mind has been fully engaged for eighteen hours and needs to stop. You edit on Sunday and Monday and lose the rest of the next week to the processing.
Thao worked weekdays. Weekends were the only time we had together as a family. And for years — for the entire run of our first daughter Meghan's early childhood — I was handing those weekends to other people's most important days.
Thao shot alongside me for some of those weddings. She had a good eye and the couples loved having two photographers working different angles of the same moment. But as Meghan got older and we started thinking about a second child, the logistics of both of us being gone every weekend became untenable. She stepped back from the shoots. I kept going, alone, which meant the weekend cost doubled in a different way — she was now carrying the family solo every Saturday while I was pointing a camera at strangers' first dance.
A detail shot from one of the later weddings — rings, flowers, hands, or a quiet moment between ceremony and reception. The kind of image the 200mm excels at even at short distance: all depth, all color, nothing distracting.
2020
Claire was born in 2020. Around the same time, COVID arrived and made the question of whether to keep shooting weddings temporarily moot — the weddings postponed themselves. The calendar cleared. The phone stopped ringing in the way it had been ringing.
And I discovered that I did not miss it the way I thought I would.
I missed the destination shoots. I missed the 200mm at golden hour. I missed the particular focus that comes from a day where your only job is to see — ten hours of pure attention, no other responsibilities, just the light and the people and the geometry of the space. That kind of singular purpose is rare and I knew I was giving it up.
But the weekends with Claire and Meghan — and later with Emily, and eventually Cody — I did not miss what I had been trading away. I was there for Saturday mornings now. I was there for the park and the bike ride and the thing that happened at breakfast that was only funny if you were there. These are the unremarkable things that constitute a childhood, and they happen exclusively on weekends, and I had been absent for most of them for a decade.
Alan Watts wrote about the way we sacrifice the present for a future that never quite arrives — how we defer the actual living of our lives in favor of preparing for a life we imagine we'll eventually get to. Wedding photography had been, for me, a form of that deferral. I was photographing the beginning of other people's lives while the beginning of my own children's lives was happening in another room without me.
COVID did not make me retire. It gave me a pause long enough to realize I didn't want to resume.
What I Still Miss
The 200mm f/2 lives in a case in the garage. I take it out occasionally for portrait sessions with the kids, and every time I do I am reminded of why it is an unreasonable lens that produces entirely reasonable results. Nothing else I own renders light quite the way it does. The color, the separation, the way a subject seems to step forward out of the frame — it is a physical property of optics that I spent ten years learning to exploit, and it does not transfer to a 50mm or an 85mm in the way you might hope.
I miss the discipline of a wedding day — that ten-hour window of pure attention. In ordinary life, attention is always divided. There is always something else to think about, something else pulling at the edges of the day. A wedding day was the opposite of that. One thing, fully, for twelve hours.
I miss Painted Hills most specifically. I have looked at those photographs more than any others from the decade. Something about the landscape — the geological patience of it, those layers of ash accumulated over millions of years, completely indifferent to the human ceremony happening in front of them — made for images that felt like they were about more than the wedding. I don't know how to explain that more precisely. The hills made the portraits feel like they were about time itself.
But Claire is four now. Meghan is in middle school. Emily does things every Saturday that I am there to see. Cody is here, brand new, and the weekends belong to all of them. The cameras still come out. The 200mm still makes the same light. It just finds different subjects now — which turns out to be the right ending for both of us.