Bridal Photography

With my 10 year old son Gabriel in tow (as an assistant?), I met Elizabeth Coleman and her mom at Portofino to create Bridal Portraits.  Because the Bridal Photography session lasted for 2 hours, we scheduled it for late in the day so that we could get both daytime and dusk images done.  Hint for future Brides: Do eat & drink (water) prior to your Bridal session.  You want to feel good so that you look as good in your Bridal Photography  as Elizabeth does.

They came in to the office to view the portraits and loved them!  Elizabeth couldn’t decide on just one image for her wall portrait which will be on display at the wedding reception so we narrowed her absolute faves down to four (or was it five) images from which we will make a montage.  Mrs Coleman said some nice things about how my son worked the reflector.  It’s a good thing he wasn’t there to hear her or he’d be asking for a raise.

Ok, here’s a Photo-Video of the Bridal Photography images that I showed Elizabeth & her mom.

Stuttering Video?  Click pause to let it download completely then unpause.

Friends & Family can go to the Print Ordering site to make professional print purchases.

About Editing, Enhancing & Retouching
The 75 or so images that you saw in the above Photo-Video were the result of much more photography work than it may at first seem. Of course there’s the preparation that goes with any photography session but I’m writing now about some of the post production effort.

After the session was over, I ended up with more than 160 images. I think back to a mentor who always culled the number of images down to 15 for presentation to the client. True we (the clients & I) end up spending A LOT more time viewing and deciding on faves but I just can’t bring myself to leave anything I like on the figurative editing floor. Also I think my style of shooting creates a lot more variety of images than his does.

Edit
So how do I edit? the first thing I do is remove any images that are obviously not usable. Usually it’s an experiment that’s gone awry or closed eyes or an undesirable expression. Then I group the images by same or very similar pose. I’ll choose the best expressions within that group and keep only different expressions using image sharpness as one of my final decision criteria.
To judge image sharpness I then view each of the similar images at what is known as 1:1. This means that each pixel of the image is displayed as 1 pixel on the monitor. This is something that can only be done on professional editing software and is crucial for deciding on any images that will be used to create wall portraits.

Enhance
Once the editing is complete, I then focus on technical & creative adjustments that I can make to the groups of remaining images. I may adjust color temperature, exposure, vignetting, clarity & perhaps even some cropping. The ending result is a set of images that is ready for viewing and selecting by the client. Here’s a web page that I created showing the Enhanced & Un-enhanced version of several of the above Bridal Portraits.