Jewish Photographer in Flatbush, Brooklyn

A Flatbush simcha is usually planned by a family that has been to a great many of them. Midwood, Kensington and the blocks on either side of Ocean Parkway are home to a community that is yeshivish, Sephardic and everything in between, and the expectations about what gets photographed are specific: the badeken and the walk to the chuppah properly covered, both sides of the mechitza during the dancing, the shtick from inside the circle, and the family portraits done at the start of the evening rather than at eleven o'clock at night. A photographer who has to be told any of that is already behind.

Many Flatbush simchas happen outside the neighbourhood — in a hall in Boro Park, in a shul's own simcha hall, or down the Parkway in Lakewood and at the Jersey Shore, where we are based. We work those rooms regularly and know which have a balcony worth using for the dancing, which have a room suited to the kallah's portraits, and which have a street outside where nothing can wait. For a bar mitzvah, the leining is on Shabbos or a weekday morning in shul, so the portraits in tallis and tefillin, with his father and grandfathers, are planned for a day the camera is allowed. For an engagement or a vort, the Brooklyn waterfront is a short drive away, and the galleries below show what it looks like at sunset.

Photography and cinema are one in-house team, so in a crowded hall there is one crew to work around rather than two, and a Brooklyn date carries no travel charge. The Brooklyn page covers the borough as a whole and the Boro Park page its neighbour; the Brooklyn wedding, bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah pages go into more detail on each occasion. If your date is set, tell us the hall and we will lay out how we would cover it.