By Elizabeth Daza
It’s a lucky day for those getting married today at the city clerk’s office in Manhattan. Newlyweds will have the opportunity to walk away with a free portrait by one of the most celebrated photographers in the world—Nikon Ambassador Joe McNally.
These portraits won’t be made in any ordinary photo studio. McNally has created a mobile and fully-functional photo studio out of the back of a 20’ box truck. Parked just outside the city clerk’s office, couples will be invited in for a portrait session in this unique pop-up studio.
McNally, who has photographed covers for Newsweek and National Geographic, came up with idea while photographing his own friends’ wedding years ago at City Hall. On his blog, he wrote: “…I found myself in an effervescent swirl of happy humanity, all of them there to simply declare their love of someone. This wasn’t atheist, or Christian, or Jewish, or Buddhist. It didn’t have a color, or a preference. It wasn’t about where you were from. It was about where you were about to go with the person you had just declared your love for.” It was this joy and energy that McNally wanted to help other couples to capture, and he came up with a unique way to do it.
Due to the stark nature of the backdrop surrounding City Hall, McNally knew it would be too difficult to set up an intimate portrait session on a New York City sidewalk—and that’s when the Nikon Wedding Truck Studio was born. With the help of Nikon USA, McNally was able to create a fully-staffed truck studio complete with speedlights and backdrops.
Having shot in exotic locations all over the globe, shooting out of the back of a mobile pop-up studio was a new idea for McNally, and he says the experience this week will be “a hoot couple days, and so much fun to craft these portraits inside a 20’ box truck.”
The truck will be parked on June 5 outside of the Office of the City Clerk, near 141 Worth Street in New York City. The portrait sessions will be free of charge, provided on a first come-first serve basis.
