Photography

June 20, 2017

Behind The Scenes | A Bride’s Details

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

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

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