"A Beautiful Place"

"A Beautiful Place"
©David A. Ziser

This image was made yesterday during our class shoot. The location was one of our Cincinnati favorites for wedding photography. The Phoenix has this great stairway which offers a wonderful location for bridal portraits - the bride's love it. As I was making this image, my first choice was to light the bride with my "shoot through" umbrella technique. The problem was that it lit up too much of the left side of the image really distracting the focus being on the bride. My solution was to pull out my trusty "Z-Ray" light and just illuminate her with a very small cone of light that wouldn't spill on the surrounds. The 2800 K color temperature of the high power flash light meant that the daylight flooding the scene in the background would be rendered in blue tones because of the camera's color balance setting - 2800K - to get the proper color balance on the bride. The solution worked perfectly and I captured this image of my bride. The wide angle lens pulled all the elements of the location into the composition resulting in a quite dramatic bridal image. Camera specs; Canon 5D Mark II fitted with 24-105mm IS lens at 24mm, F4.5 @ 1/20 second, ISO 1600. Enjoy! -David