I usually save this kind of post for the end of the year, but after last weekend’s wedding and all of the beautiful details, which you can see HERE, I wanted to share how I got a couple of those shots with you.

My bride, Kirsten, was getting ready with her bridesmaids at a super cute lake house.  The only thing was that it had a wrap around porch on the back of the house, but it was almost fully covered, which meant there wasn’t a lot of natural light coming through the windows.  But there WAS a corner on the uncovered part of the porch that was in open shade, which meant I had some good light and no shade directly overhead (like if I’d been under the covered porch).  So, I used one of the small tables from the porch, placed my reflector on top of the small table to have a larger surface area to work on, and then propped a white pillow against the outside wall so I could have a clean background and a bit more reflection of light onto the details.  I then used one of the bridesmaid’s skirts to add some color into the mix!

And here was the resulting shot… My setting for the ring shot below: ISO 800, f5.0, 1/640
Usually an aperture of  5.0 would put all of these things in focus, but when using a macro lens, you’re able to get super close to what you’re photographing and the lens is actually compressing the image a lot more than say a 50mm lens would.  So, I’m still able to get that beautiful creamy bokeh in the background!

This photo is the exact same except for one thing.  You can see that the image on the right is a lot brighter and no, it’s not because I edited it before posting!  These two photos only have my pre-set applied (which all my photos receive when importing into Lightroom).  The only difference is that I set up a miniature reflector for the second shot I took because I just needed a little fill-light!  That’s IT!

And what’s even better is that my “miniature reflector” was simply the back of the RSVP card propped up against the top of the ring box.  I used to doubt that little things like this made any kind of difference, but once I tried it, I realized that other photographers who had been pointing this out to me for ages really did know what they were talking about!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or shoot me an email!