The Wedding Photography Project

Okay, I missed an email and this is the real final entry!  This image comes from Ryan Brenizer.

This is a photo, “Stars in their eyes,” was taken at a wedding in Litchfield Connecticut with Danny and Kelly, a great couple. No flash was used for this image; the foreground was actually in deep shadow, so I used a hi ISO to ensure that the sunlight behind them would be slightly overpowering. It was shot with the Fuji S5 Pro, which capured the dynamic range of the scene nicely. 24mm f/4 with a Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8.

This image comes from Aleks at Polka Photos in Los Angeles.

I didn’t have a lot of time to capture this image.  I saw the bride coming into the limo and started shooting.  The ISO was set to 160 since I had been shooting outdoors and my settings were 1/100 at 5.0.  Processing was relatively simple.  When I process black & whites I often think in terms of what I would have done in a darkroom.  In Photoshop, however, I always start processing in color and save a color version first.  In Levels RGB channel I pulled in the blacks to give the photo lots of contrast.  I did a little bit of burning of midtones on the left hand side where there was a window and someone’s arm was visible.  I then converted to black & white.  Burned the window down a bit more as well as the glasses in the foreground.  Using Curves added a bit more contrast.  Then finally used the Unsharp Mask tool at radius 1.0 pixels until I like the sharpening (don’t remember the percent but I would guess around 130).  And voila!

This image comes from Eric Laurits.

the ceremony had just finished and we were in a trolley [it's Maine,
what can i say!] heading to the reception site. As we were putting
along the trolley began to sputter and slowly came to a rest, smoke
pouring out of the engine. The wedding party hopped out and since we
just happened to be right across the street from a beautiful old
covered bridge, headed over there with a bottle of champagne.  They
were toasting and laughing about the whole thing and just hanging out
until the “replacement trolley” showed up.  The light was flooding in
through the sides of the bridge as it does only in New England
summers.  One of the bridesmaids was asking the bride about her dress
[which her grandmother made for her  - completely from scratch!] and
the maid of honor, not quite used to the trimmings and trappings of
wedding celebrations, shot me a look that is wise beyond her years.

To process this photo i basically just ran an action that i created a
few years back called “yells, y’all.” I’d have to really dive back
through the steps to give you specific details, but basically what it
does is this : creates a duplicate layer and desaturates to about 40%
[blending mode to soft light i think]. Then it creates a layer with
just the shadow detail and softens it a bit.  Then we select
highlights and create curves layer set to hue to give it the
beginnings of the color overlay. The whole thing is then duplicated
and set to overlay where i run a high pass filter and some gaussian
blur and fade to taste. Then I throw a curves layer on top that really
tones the yellow/gold to taste.  I sharpened the shadows with unsharp
mask ad the midtones and highlights with smart sharpen.

This image comes from Jessica Del Vecchio in Maryland.

I shot this from sitting on the ground to get a different perspective of the traditional cake cutting.  When I saw it in post, I knew I wanted to make this black & white.  Tara & Eric, the bride and groom, didn’t want any formals - we did a few quick shots by the fireplace during the reception and that was it.  Tara had told me she only needed one special shot of the two of them and earlier in the day, the bride had shown me her parents wedding photo (the “special one”) which was when they were cutting their cake.  Of course I was thrilled that Tara & Eric loved this image and we had it printed on canvas as a 20×24 gallery wrap.

These images come from Ellen McRayney from Atlanta.

This image was taken at the end of a reception, right before the bride and
groom made their exit. It was an afternoon wedding/reception, so there was
plenty of light coming in through the windows. I asked the bride to stand
facing the windows, which were covered by white sheerish fabric, and hold her
bouquet behind her back. In photoshop, I cropped the image to be square then
duplicated the background layer. The bride had warned me before the wedding
that she had sports bra tan lines that she would prefer not to see if possible
in her pictures. They were very evident in this image across her back and
shoulder, so I used the healing brush and patch tool to remove tan lines on the
separate layer. I put a 10 point black stroke around the square image because
I wanted there to be a definitive line where the image ended. With the white
curtains and the white dress, I felt like the items in the image needed an
ending point. Then I added a gaussian blur (again on a separate layer). This
gave a nice glow to the image, softened skin, dress, veil, including softening
the black stroke at the edge of the image. I added a black mask to the
gaussian blur layer (alt-mask icon at the bottom of layers palette for PC) and
painted detail back into the critical areas with the brush tool (flowers,
jewelry) and with a decreased opacity brush tool brought back in a little more
detail to the areas of contrast and to the bride herself.

This image was taken just after the ceremony as the bride and groom walked out of the church and it is actually my sister.  I knew that Craig and Rebecca were excited about having the Rolls to drive them from the church to the reception, so I knew I wanted to incorporate the car into the shots.  The processing was minimal.  I shoot everything RAW, so I opened the image in Bridge, bumped up the exposure just slightly and gave it a low dark vignette (-36).  Saved it and it was done.

This image comes from Stephen Kane Photography.

I liked the light coming through the glass and the gesture of the hand.  This image was taken with Fuji Velvia, scanned with a Nikon Supercoolscan.  There were no alterations.

The Cool Photo Contest ends tomorrow, July 4.  Send in your entries now to be considered for the free Boda Bag!

This entry comes from Maurice Photo in Seattle.

The bride was standing on a concrete platform that raised her up a little
bit. I crouched down to get the low perspective. The hardest part was
bouncing light back on her face. As you can see the sun is very harsh
across the right side of her face, so we bounced some light back in using
a white reflector. This helped brighten up the shadow side. It was also
shot RAW, and developed in CS3. The new fill light adjustment in CS3 was
helpful in bringing up the brightness in the shadows as well.

The movement of the veil is completely from the wind that was blowing. I
like this shot because of that. I sometimes cheat a little and have an
assistant lift the veil and run out of the frame, but the result never
looks as good as when you have wind blowing it naturally like in this
picture.

This cold image comes from Petra Hall in Sweden!

My couple Maria and David decided to get married in the coldest month of the year here in northern Sweden, i.e. in February. Not only is it cold in February, but we also don’t have many hours of daylight. It was a bit of a struggle to separate the bride’s white clothes from the snow, so I used a fill flash.  The light was very nice and soft that day mostly due to snow clouds, and the fill flash helped to enhance the dress by making it warmer in comparison to the surrounding snow and ice. In this particular image we were lucky to have the clouds scatter for a few minutes and gave us a bit of blue sky. The sky reflects on the snow and makes it blue normally, but I did make the snow even bluer in post processing, to add to the cold feeling of the image you see here.

These entries come from Sara at Whitebox Weddings!

The bride, Kristen, is an actress and a make-up junkie.  This ring shot was taken on the cover of one of her favorite books,  Making Faces, by makeup artist Kevin Naucoin.

We were waiting for Kristen to get the finishing touches on her makeup so we played around with a few different ring set ups, but this was our favorite.   Melanie is the detail specialist of our dynamic duo, so she used the Canon 5D with the 100 macro to get this fun and quirky shot.  Window light created the soft light.  There was not much to do in photoshop other than slightly adjust the levels and do a little bit of dodging and burning on the details.

This is a filmstrip that we created using a series of 3 photos that were taken just after Carrie and Eric’s ceremony.  They had such a cool wedding.  The weekend long event took place at a camp in the mountains of NC.  We shoot as a team.  Usually we are both shooting with different focal length lenses or from different angels, but during this moment Melanie was using the 5D with the 50mm 1.4  and I was talking to the couple…..you will never know what we were talking about, but don’t you wish you were there!  In photoshop we used some of the amazing Boutwell totally rad actions.  We like to use the boring black and white action and warm it up a bit.  We also added some grain to these images.  The filmstrip border is one of David Jay’s showit borders.