Tips for Elegant Wedding Photography: Capturing Those Special Moments

Tips for Elegant Wedding Photography: Capturing Those Special Moments
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More Epic Than Reality

Though they have social and relational connotations, weddings at their fundamental core are elegant events that attempt to match the feeling of love with grand celebration. Weddings are rarely intended to look underwhelming, and wedding photography is not designed to have a realistic portrayal of the event. Instead, they are put together to make the wedding look even more epic than it did in person in the same way that the memories of the beautiful event are not necessarily going to be the most accurate record. Here is a look at elegant wedding photography and some tips for you to follow when you are attempting to do this yourself.

Image credit: stock.xchng - Beautiful Bride with bouquet! (stock photo by papaleguas)

Camera Tilt

The main principle of elegant photography in general is the same for elegant wedding photography. You want to have both the subjects and the location, meaning the spectacle in general, needs to appear overpowering and overwhelming. This means making it look taller and having it tower over you as the observer. The most simple way of doing this is tilt the camera up from a lower angle, bringing the subjects above your perspective. This is one of the classic visual tricks in photography and film to give power to a subject, and you can easily just downshift all of the camera angles that you use in your elegant wedding photography. You do not need to create an extremely low angle or upturned tilt, but really just enough to add a general sense of authority to the subjects and objects in the frame.

The Happy Couple

Since the wedding is really built around the two partners themselves, you need to try and capture an aspect of their relationship. Try working with them ahead of time so that you get a sense of their personality, as well as how they physically move together. Though you are trying to do elegant wedding photography, you still want to maintain a sense of personality. The difference here is that you will likely remain more stable and traditional with your framing, yet you will still need to try and capture the moments that draw out the details of their relationship.

Technical

High quality images with incredible detail will really make or break elegant wedding photography. This means that on a technical level you will have to approach this a number of ways. First, select shutter speeds that will not allow in motion blur. This will mean going over a 1/60 shutter speed in most situations as well as making sure you have enough light to balance this out. You should select the right focal distance for your position, and it does work nicely to have the couple in focus while the rest of the background crowd is soft. You should also ensure that you are always shooting in the RAW format so that the images come in uncompressed and in as high a quality as they can be for when you do your photo editing.

References

Source: Author’s own experience.

Wedding Photography Tips and Techniques. https://www.basic-photography-tips.com/wedding-photography-tips.html

This post is part of the series: Wedding Photography

Articles with tips for wedding photography.

  1. Elegant Wedding Photography
  2. How to Do Effects in Wedding Photography with Photoshop
  3. Top 10 Candid Wedding Photography Tips & Techniques
  4. Take Great Wedding Shots with Appropriate Photography Lights
  5. How to Start a Wedding Photography Business