Jerry & Mia
Inside the rotunda, with the ocean showing through the columns. Sound on.
Through the columns.
Jerry and Mia were married at Pelican Hill, and the frame their film keeps returning to is the one taken from inside the rotunda, looking out through the colonnade with the Pacific filling the gaps between the columns.
That structure is the signature of the property and it is genuinely difficult to shoot well. Point the camera the wrong way and it is a pretty building. Point it correctly and it frames the ocean for you.
Notes on the place.
The rotunda at Pelican Hill is a domed, colonnaded pavilion at the end of the oval event lawn, and the trick with it is to stop treating it as a backdrop and start using it as a frame. Standing inside and shooting outward puts hard vertical columns either side of the couple with a hundred and eighty degrees of ocean behind them, which does more for a shot than any amount of open lawn. The light comes through in bands, so exposure has to hold both the shaded stone and the bright water.
