We simply asked our bride to walk up and down the road and while doing so, to hold and play with her dress. We asked her that when she swung her dress, to look down towards it. This helps her to forget about looking into our camera and can bring out some really beautiful, and flattering angles.
Alrighty [Bride], let’s have you walk up and down here and while you’re walking, I want you to play with your dress. Hold it up and let it catch some wind, let it swing side to side and all the while, try and look down towards it. You can look in either direction but just try not to look into our camera unless we ask you to.
As our bride neared us, we wanted to fill the frame with her as her movements were really graceful and we felt that a tighter composition would bring out more of this drama than one that was too wide. We let her walk right up close to us while we kept shooting, and we left just enough space around her so we could fine-tune the crop when editing. This compostion works not only because all points of interest are within one column, but her arms also create these leading lines that lead back towards her.
Center Framed
We lost a bit of focus on her face unfortunately and we think it was because of the flare from the sun. The camera seemed to then quickly jump to her dress for focus, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just wasn’t our intention. That being said, it’s such a minor imperfection that it’ll only really matter to those who are pedantic about these things. Which, most importantly, our couple were not .
Live View Continuous
Single Point
The Dress
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.
We purposely chose to backlight our bride in this shot as the sun was still a little too harsh for us to use it directionally. By backlighting our bride, we were able to make her dress and her hair really glow and stand out from the background. We also framed the image so a bit of the sun started to peek in from the top causing a flare. This can be quite challenging as it may throw your focus off (as it happened here).
Natural Light
Afternoon
Sunny
We really wanted to bring out the warmth of the sun with this shot and so our edits were definitely made with this in mind. We applied our protea preset and then adjusted the usual white balance, exposure, contrasts, shadows, highlights, and the rest of the sliders in the Basic panel until we got the overall tone that we wanted. We added a slight vignette to darken the edges and added a radial filter to enhance the sun slightly.
The main challenge was the focus as with such a strong flare, the camera really struggled to find it’s lock.
We let our camera lock on to a spot on our bride that wasn’t so affected by the flaring, which happened to be the dress of the bride. It wasn’t so much that we chose to do that, but rather that we saw it happen and let it do it’s thing.
Oasi Gelsomineto
96012 Avola, Province of Syracuse, Italy
Garden / Field
Italy
If you find yourself in a situation where the light isn’t super soft and easy to work with, really try use it as a backlight. It’s quite simple and can be really really beautiful. Just expose for the skin of your subject and accept that the background may very well blow out. You could also vary your angle and shooting height to see if you could frame it slightly differently.
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