One of the things I love about weddings is that they are all different. Weddings all have different kinds of details at different venues with different timelines. Sometimes you have an entire hour to shoot the bride's details in a big beautiful room or you have a porch with great natural light that you can use. But sometimes you have a real "make it work" moment.
But the great thing about photography is that you CHOOSE what goes in the picture. You can choose not to show some things! I wanted to share a couple of pull-back shots from recent weddings and sessions so you can see what I'm talking about.
Working with the situation that you're given and making magic happen is so rewarding! I often love these shots more because of all the effort it took to get it!
This first example is from a wedding I 2nd shot recently at the Lesner Inn. They have a nice little bridal room upstairs, but it can easily get cluttered. This wedding had a lot of flowers and the bouquets were sitting across the chairs. There wasn't a whole lot of free floor space to move them, so I left the bouquets were they were and shot a tight vertical of the shoes on the little table. And presto! A clean simple background.
For my Thanksgiving stylized shoot, we had a lot of shots we wanted to get in a limited amount of time. So I wanted to get a few shots of our model out of the way before we started shooting the tablescape. The room at Steinhilbers is pretty wide open and we had a lot of our stylized shoot boxes and things scattered around. So this main wall was really the only good shooting space. So I squeezed our model in between the table that Hearts Content Design was setting up and this TV and cropped in tight.
Another "make it happen" moment took place at my most recent engagement session. It had rained all day, but we couldn't cancel the shoot because the groom was visiting from out of town for the weekend. So there was no dry place to set things down for ring shots. But my car is dry! So I opened the door and squatted down to use the seat as my ring shot surface. The beautiful thing about ring shots is that you create your own background, so you could literally take this shot anywhere!
These are just a few examples of the behind the scenes magic that goes on during CGP weddings and sessions!
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Behind the Scenes 2015
Behind the Scenes 2014
A Work Day with CGP
A Wedding Day with CGP
What I Wear to Weddings
Am I the Right Photographer for You