According to "The Knot", a bride's wedding attire will likely be the third biggest of expense of her wedding. And yet despite the time, thought. and money invested in her gown, veil, shoes, and jewelry, many brides will allocate only a few minutes of time for bridal portraits on their wedding day! We always encourage brides to devote a minimum of 30 minutes just for her photos! Or even better, go with the Southern tradition and give your bridal portraits the attention they deserve at a completely separate time; this option also allows you to test run your hair and makeup, get super-comfortable being photographed, and feel like princess/model/rockstar all day. When photographing bridals, we love to get the customary full length that highlights the bride's dress and the classic closeup that features the bride's beauty.
But the images we and our brides usually love the most are ones where we can experiment a bit and get creative! This bride requested a photo that showed the back of her couture Galia Lahav dress and cathedral veil. Her mom and dad wanted to come along for the photo shoot too, and they took on the surprisingly daunting task of veil wranglers - at 120 inches, this was one long and hard-to-handle veil! As we were setting up for a more traditional back-of-the-dress photo in front of a dark door, the bride's parents lifted the veil to spread it out evenly. The sheer material looked so graceful as the length of it fell to the ground, we wanted to capture that feeling. Lying on the floor underneath the veil, Chris shot the image with the Canon 16-35 mm lens at 8.0 to keep the detail of the gown while incorporating the blur of the movement of the veil. The result of multiple "fluffing" attempts with the cooperation of the bride's parents resulted in lots of laughter, a fun memory for the bride and her family, and an ethereal bridal image.
