Bridal Portraits

I did some bridal portraits last night for a very good friend. I have been trying to get brides to let me shoot them indoors on a black background so that the images could be black and white. The white dress with a black background really creates some powerful contrast and draws attention to the dress. Finally I was able to, mainly because my friend was nice enough to be my guinea pig.

For the project I rented two 6' tall strip boxes. The guy at the rental place acted like I was crazy for wanting to use them for bridal portraits! But I wish he could have been in the room with me as I shot some of the most powerful and dramatic bridal portraits I have ever shot. I put one on either side of her so that only her sides were lit. The bride loves them and I'm hoping that now that I have something to show to future brides I will be able to do it more often.
I mean, why would you not want to shoot indoors in July in Texas??? Its 100+ degrees outside, with 90% humidity!! This way you can do your hair and makeup and it stays the way you want it. You are not wearing a 10lb dress and sweating for 2 hours. OK, I can't promise you won't break a little sweat in a studio with lights and a heavy dress, but I guarantee it will not be anywhere near as bad as if you were outside!

I can't show you the photos I got for another month or so, but this is the basic setup I did:

Photoshop Tip

For those of you who use photoshop to process your images I ran across something that might be of use to you.

You may have noticed that your images lose some saturation when they are uploaded to the internet. I have heard that this can be avoided by using the "sRGB" color profile. However, I still notice considerable desaturation.

While trying to make sure my images were, indeed, in the "sRGB" profile today I ran across a great feature that prevents the loss of your original color.

Under the "Edit" menu, scroll down to the "color settings" option.



This will bring up a dialog box where you can change various settings.
If you view it with the "more options" button enabled you will see an option to desaturate by 20%.



This effectively gives you a preview of what the image will look like once it is on the web.
From there, you can re-saturate it up to the way you want it to look. I used the sponge tool, but you could throw a hue/saturation adjustment layer over it just as easily.

Save it as a JPG and when it uploads the image will look normal.

Babies - they make everyone smile (well almost...)

I agreed to act as "photographer" for a friend's "baby's first birthday" party.
Didn't realizing that there would be a whole pack of little rugrats running around! But I quickly settled in and got a few great photos.

Here is my favorite (ironically not of the birthday girl...)



Shot through a play house window.