One of my favorite things to photograph on the wedding day are the details!! I love showing up to the bride getting ready and photographing things like her perfume, jewelry, veil, bouquet, dress, invitation suite, etc. These things might only tell a small part of their wedding “story” but they are so significant in the fact that these were the details that they spent hours picking out and making sure went together beautifully. The details also make things like the pages of an album come together cohesively when photographed in a way to tell the story of the entire day.
There are some tricky situations that can happen though while you photograph the details. You might enter a bridal suite with bridesmaids or things everywhere (this is normal!) or it might be really dark. Not every wedding venue or hotel comes with beautiful colored chairs or the perfect backdrop for photos. When it comes to these types of situations, I always like to keep one thing in mind- I need good light!! That is crucial for me. I always try to find somewhere to shoot with better light!! Light is so important in the way I photograph. With that being said, you will laugh knowing that because I know all I need is some good light a little spot with minimal distractions, I shoot in a lot of random places while being surrounded by a lot of stuff!! And that is totally OK! Because most of the details are photographed with my 105mm macro lens or the 50mm, I can make sure to avoid having a lot of the distractions and “busyness” come into the photo by strategically cropping. The second thing I make sure to do in these situations is to shoot wide open or with a low numbered f-stop such as a 1.4-2.2. This will help really eliminate any of the crazy that is happening! If you are strategically cropping and making sure that you are shooting wide open, no one will ever know the exact conditions you were shooting in!!
A little recap- find good light and shoot wide open to create as much blur as possible and to minimize distractions that you cannot hide.
Here’s an example where I found good light and shot wide open to give me the best chance to really capture these details in the best way possible when I didn’t have a ton of options on where to shoot. It was FREEZING cold outside and I needed to be by a window to give me some good light. This is what we came up with-
With these next two, what you don’t see are the two guys spraying down the patio for the reception and the fact that underneath us was a tile flooring that I was trying to avoid having in the photo. On my left was a slider door that connected me to the bridal suite. When I was shooting the invitation suite, I knew that I needed to shoot a little wider. In order to block the tile flooring, I used the veil to hide the corners of tile that were creeping in!
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