Preparing for Vision & Creativity

A few days ago I was asked about how we prepare for our weddings. Now there are so many different things on our To-Do list to get ready but we thought we would share with you one of the more important planning details during our prep. We always arrive early to the area where the wedding is being held. This allows us to drive around and scout out locations for portraits of the bride and groom as well as the wedding party. But even months before the wedding we have already familiarized ourselves with a map of the area, and studied photos of possible portrait locations that we seek out online. While we are surveying the town around the site of the ceremony and reception we take quick photos with a small, cheap camera. These shots are not meant to be anything extraordinary, they are simply to allow us to decide later on which sites we think are worth going to, based on the time we have to work with. Below is one of these shots taken before a wedding we photographed along the Allegheny River in Foxburg, PA. You will see that the shot isn’t anything special (except for my beautiful wife Carolyn of course), but when you see the portrait we took later on in the day, you can see how the vision carried over. When we looked at the reception hall we saw the beautiful river winding away into the distance, and the picture you see of the bride and groom, is more or less the photograph that I was imagining. In that quick instant, I had already planned on where to put our model lighting to make them stand out from the scene, and had framed the shot in my mind. Something else we would like to point out is that the portrait of Mark and Melissa has not been photo-shopped or retouched in any way. What you see is exactly how it looked when we pulled it from the camera.

Now we have to be prepared to take our portraits anywhere, in fact, at this wedding, the rain ended up eliminating several locations we had picked out. Fortunately we had a few others scouted out, and ultimately we used an unplanned location that was better than the locations we had picked for nice weather! We will be posting those next week, but it is likely that a shot like this that takes time to set up model lighting for, may not have happened if we hadn’t taken the time to plan for it in advance.

Another advantage to taking a quick sample shot early in the day, is that when we are communicating to our couples the shot we want to take, they can get an idea what we are looking for and also know that it is worth making the extra time to take the shot. In this case we stepped away from the reception to take this portrait, and Mark and Melissa were more than happy to make the time because we had showed them our vision for the shot. All in all I think we only needed a few  minutes of their time to get this amazing shot, because we had taken the time to prepare.