1) Sometimes at weddings, the best man's speech offering humorous anecdotes from the couples past, is "fine". Sometimes it is epic.  Knowing these guys, I suspected this would be the latter. My goal for this shot was to do justice to that moment.

I wanted distinctive bokeh so as to give prominence to the michevious performance of the speaker. That was my story here. But not so much bokeh that I'd lose the reactions of the wedding party. I decided to get down low as well to give my subject prominance.  

I did not want the look of flash but I needed enough light to be able to get sharpness on my subject. So, to work with the available light, I kept my ISO up as high as I could tolerate, my shutter speed as low as possible and tried to look for the pregnant pause moments of well delivered comedy, when there would be less motion.Ultimately ISO 3200, aperture F 2.5 (on an 85mm 1.4 lens), a shutter speed of 1/250, provided the balance I was after. Finally, I decided that colors distracted from the emotions of what I thought was a classic moment and so went with a gray scale look.