- afternoon
- Looking Back
- Soft Light
- road
- Playful
- Natural Light
- Movement
- Looking over shoulder
- Leading lines
- Bridal Portrait
- full body
- Energetic
- Dancing
- Cloudy
- Center Framed
- Bride
- Walking
The story behind the image
That’s when we decided, why not. It’s an awesome shot – let’s see what it looks like when we edit it in our current flow. And voila. We have an image that we are just as proud about now as we were back then, and the coolest thing about going back and re-editing old work? You have a bunch of ‘new’ content to share on IG.
Directions
Describe how you spoke to your subject(s)
We simply asked our bride to walk up and down the road while occasionally turning back to us with a smile. We told her to have a sort of ‘trot’ in her step; just enough to let the dress bounce slightly but not too much to make her hair fall out of place. We kept the energy levels up, the good mood high and made sure she had a great time.
What did you say?
So [Bride], I want you to walk to that point over there, and walk back towards us. A few times. Over and over. And while doing it, try and turn and look back at us with that stunning smile of yours. Also, bounce a little when you walk! There you go! Have fun with it! :D Stunning!
Composition
The composition was very straight forward for this shot as we had the road creating natural leading lines directed towards the bride’s face. We had the bride walk in the middle of the road to help find this symmetry with those lines.
framing
Center Framed
Focusing
Describe how you spoke to your subject(s)
We simply moved our single focus point over the face of our bride and kept refocusing between shots. As our bride was moving directly towards us and away from us, we did have to act fast with our refocusing. Alas, we could have used the AF tracking but have had unreliable results in the past, and chose to do it this way.
Focus Mode
Single Shot Autofocus
Focus POints
Single Point
Focused on
The Bride's face
Equipment &
Exif
Camera
Lens
Flash
Filter
1/250 @ f/1.8 ISO125 WB-Auto
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.
Light & Weather
Being October time in the UK, the sky was completely overcast. This gave us the complete freedom to shoot wherever we liked without needing to pay attention to the sun. The sky becomes this giant soft box so the light is incredibly pleasant to work with. In this particular shot, the sun was just behind us and to the left, and quite high up as this was taken around lunch.
Light Type
Natural Light
Time of day
Afternoon
Weather
Cloudy
Editing Workflow
How did you edit this image?
We started with our protea preset (golden) and tweaked the global exposures to get the tones that we really liked; paying attention to the skin tones primarily. Afterwards, we then added in a few radial filter adjustments to create manual vignettes as well as one specifically to reduce sharpening on the outside of our bride (to add more blur, basically). Finally, we did a bit of dodging and burning to bring our more details while also using a gradient filter to darken the floor slightly.
Editing Software
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Preset Used
Challenges
The main challenge we had with this shoot was keeping to the time schedule as we were all having so much fun. It’s so easy to get carried away and forget that there’s an actual party happening that the bride and groom should get back to.
Solutions
It always helps to have someone pay attention to the time, or at least, set an alarm for about 15 minutes before you need to start heading back. That just gives you a little heads up that the session has to come to an end fairly soon.
Location
Location Name
Shustoke Barn
Location aDDRESS
Shustoke Barn, Coleshill Road, Shustoke, Coleshill B46 2BL, United Kingdom
Loation Type
Road
Country
United Kingdom
If you’ve noticed that your style has changed slightly over the years, take some time and go back through your old work and see if there’s still some shots that you can try and bring new life into. It’s a great way to generate more content for the social media and you may even find a few gems there that you forgot about entirely.
