As our couple was to walk quite a distance away from us, we made sure to give them a briefing of not only what to do, but where to do it. We asked them to keep an eye out for our hand signals of when to stop, and when to start. We asked them to move to the point in the middle of the arch, and to practice their first dance; and to throw in a few spins while they’re at it.
Righty guys – let’s give this a shot. When you get to the middle of the arch on the cliff, look towards us and we’ll direct you where to stand with our hands. We’ll give you a thumbs up and then practice your first dance together. Even go for a few spins here and there where you [to the groom] hold her hand up and let her spin beneath
The composition here is definitely not the strongest, though we did aim to keep the couple below the horizon line. We did this because we found it more distracting to have the horizon cut right through them. Where our composition failed was the fact that we didn’t include enough ‘breathing’ room around the cliff to make the image feel a bit more ‘on purpose’. That being said, we did aim to keep the couple in the center of the frame as they would be competing for attention from the landscape, and so having them almost dead-center, we gave them a bit more emphasis.
As our couple was pretty far away, we made sure to use the smallest focus box on the live view screen and we quickly zoomed in to make sure they were sharp. We had it on One Shot as we didn’t want to lose focus in case we moved or something flew in front of our lens (such as the seagulls nearby).
Live View Single Shot
Single Point
the couple
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.
This was taken fairly late into the sunset as the sun was just about to set. Since the sun was already quite low and behind us (to the right), we had our couple lit quite nicely. We didn’t really have much of a choice on where we could shoot from as we aimed to get the composition over the light.
Natural Light
Afternoon
For this shot, we threw on our protea preset and tweaked the usual exposure settings in the Basic panel to get the overall tones we were after. We made sure to keep the white balance fairly neutral as we wanted to retain the blues of the ocean as we felt it would contrast nicely with the warm colors of the rocks & the sky. We then ventured into the HSL panel and tweaked things a bit further such as boosting the blues & magentas.
We added a large radial filter stretching across the screen over our couple which allowed us to darken the edges gradually, which further helped to bring more attention to our couple.
The biggest challenge would be the composition. Thinking about it, it’s the main part of the image that i wish we did a better job with.
The solution would have been to shoot a bit wider, and then have that flexibility while editing to crop in.
Suites Alba Hotel
Estr. de Albandeira, 8400-403 Lagoa, Portugal
Cliffs
Portugal
The best piece of advice I can give is to learn from your mistakes. Mistakes and failures are good things. They help us see where we need to get better at. They help us grow. And if you can spot where you went wrong, then you’re on a good path to figuring out how to not repeat it / solve it in the future. Embrace failure.
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