I shot a wedding the other night with a sweet couple from Canada. Here is one of my sunset shots of the couple.

But the bride’s daughter was at the wedding and was shooting the couple over my shoulder. Because she had herself a nice Nikon D2 digital camera (and I found out that she sold cameras in a store), but I really wasn’t too concerned.

Whenever you are a professional photographer being paid to shoot a wedding, you are always a bit leery about people shooting over your shoulder. They are using your poses and if they have good equipment, it is highly likely that they’ll get some images that you missed — and make you look bad.

Actually, even the so called “pros” here in Maui don’t often know how to do a good job. I’ve been on the beach shooting a Maui wedding at the same time as other photographers (who I have hired because I am unable to shoot both weddings). So we have exactly the same conditions.

But when we get the photos back there is virtually no sunset in the other photographer’s images. For some reason so many photographers just don’t know how to shoot a Maui sunset very well.

So I wasn’t too worried with this young girl. No one seems to do what I do when its time to shoot a sunset, and this night was no different. What I do is pretty simple: I back way up and shoot the couple with the maximum 200 mm extension of my telephone lens. This causes the sun in the background to enlarge and makes the sky behind the couple much brighter and more colorful.