It’s almost April! Beautiful weather is arriving and flowers will be blooming soon! It also means Spring wedding season in about to start with a bang! 6 weddings in April alone and I’m eager to get it started! Before the season begins however, I wanted to start a series I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Every so often I get asked about a particular photograph and how it was achieved…and I’m always happy to share! So I thought I would start posting here too~ I will tell you what I did to pose the scene or if no posing was required, my camera settings and any other important info that helped me capture that image. Let’s call it a photo recipe!

Now of course, I have to provide a little disclaimer here – because there really isn’t a foolproof “recipe” for any particular image. Many times it depends on the lighting in the room, the candid moment itself or an unexpected angle I caught last minute – but for the most part, this series will cover the main points on a few of my favorite images.

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Let’s get started!

This first image is one of my favorite “bride getting ready” images! Bekah and Jared got married at the stunning Southern Barn venue. They have a cottage on the property which has been made into a bridal suite. The cottage has multiple windows on all walls, so the room is filled from top to bottom with glorious natural light (in my opinion, one of the biggest favors a bride can do for herself on her wedding day, is getting a room with tons of natural light! It really makes for the absolute best and most flattering portraits).

I positioned Bekah in front of the vintage bed and next to one of the biggest windows in the room. As always, I don’t like to direct a picture because I think the candid moments are best but I will guide the girls on how and where to position themselves as they help the bride into her dress for optimal lighting or to make sure unwanted objects in the background don’t interfere. I will sometimes also tell a few girls to do certain jobs…  “Mary and Tracy, you two fluff Bekah’s tulle underneath her dress while Lauren and Sarah hold the train over here“.  I do this mostly to have the girls spread out and not cluster all in all one place – but I try not to say much more…

This moment happened when two of Bekah’s bridesmaids started to see their best friend’s dress coming together and started to get a little emotional…Bekah looked over and started to get misty eyed herself and then started giggling … you can feel the excitement in their eyes and the love all the girls have for each other!

My settings for this image were:

Mark iii

24-70 2.8 lens at 33mm

F-stop 3.2

1/100

ISO 640

 

Hope you enjoyed this post and found it informative!

Let me know what you think of this series and if there’s any favorite image you would like me to break down for my next Photo Recipe post!