I wanted to capture a shot of the groom holding the bride while they’re both facing the sun together as it descended behind the mountains. I faced them both in this direction because I wanted the sunlight to be outlining both of their faces and bodies to give them some separation from the background. I asked them to stand like this and simply look towards the foggy mountains for a couple of minutes so that I had enough time to move around and get a few angles.
Ok guys if you could both face towards the sun that would be awesome and if you could stand really close together and put your arms around her and hold her tight that would be awesome too. Enjoy this beautiful moment for 2 minutes and I’m just going to run around and get a few snaps.
Calm
Normally my first instinct for ‘hero shots’ such as this one is to place the couple right in the middle of the photo. 9/10 this is what I do.
However in this situation the sun was an important element and I wanted to capture a composition that would illustrate the couple looking over towards the sun. Using the rule of thirds I placed both the couple and the sun close to both vertical lines.
Single point continuous autofocus (centre frame) with the viewfinder, I focused on the couple, locked the focus and then recomposed the shot (focus and recomposing).
Single Shot Autofocus
Single Point
The Brides body
The way the EXIF is written out follows the common photographic method (with the inclusion of White Balance at the end). Here it is broken down:
Shutter Speed @ Aperture ISO White Balance.
I wanted the slightly diffused light from the setting sun to create an outline around the couple so I positioned them to the left of the frame and the sun to the right. The low blanket of clouds we’re moving really fast so the light was changing constantly and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Natural Light
Afternoon
Stormy
Edited with The Kitcheners ‘Emotive’ color preset. Exposure was lifted, white balance corrected and highlight details were recovered using the highlights slider in Lightroom. A little bit of extra exposure was brushed onto the couple to bring back a bit of detail in the darkness.
The biggest challenge was making sure I didn’t overexpose the image too much and lose all the highlight information around the area of the sun. The light was constantly changing (getting brighter then darker) every few seconds due to the clouds moving by really quickly so I had to keep an eye on my exposure settings.
I basically underexposed the photo to make sure that all detail around the sun and bright parts of the clouds were captured. The great thing about shooting RAW is that it’s easy to correct exposure and recover a little bit of lost detail in the highlights in post production.
Transfăgărășan
45.453119, 24.623970
Mountains
Romania
The most important element of capturing this image was a technical one. Having control of your exposure!
If highlight details are important to the photo make sure to expose correctly to capture them. If I hasn’t underexposed this photo much of the detail in the clouds outside of the sun would have been completely lost and the overall effect wouldn’t be as powerful.
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