"A Joyful Moment"

"A Joyful Moment"
© David A. Ziser

I’ll mention in the following post that I really enjoy capturing a couple of these images of the bride as she is just wrapping up her preparations for the wedding day. My all goal was to take some very soft, shallow focused, high key photographs of the bride using only the natural light of the bedroom window.  The window light always gives us a very soft illumination on our subject. I like to see just a simple, gentle expression of the bride framed against the white surrounds of the rest of the composition.

I also find that I like the subject’s expression gazing down. That allows, we the viewers, to look upon the image without any distractions and enjoy the gentle beauty of our subject.

I also prefer these portraits in black-and-white. The tonalities of the black-and-white are important for me too so I make a few Lightroom adjustments to get the tonalities I want. I want to shift the darker tonalities to the upper tonal values, lightening the blacks and the dark grays and pushing them into the brighter grey tonalities. For me, it just adds to the soft, gentle feeling of the portrait.

There are several ways to expand on the simple portrait approach. I would continue to take several photographs of the bride gazing down and then asked her to return her gaze back to the camera. I would run a full range of crops from a somewhat loose crop as you see right here to something much closer. This entire short portrait many session only takes a few minutes but, I think it really creates a set of compelling images that the bride, groom, and their families can really enjoy.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your image for today.

Camera specs: Canon 7D fitted with Tamron 85mm, F1.4  @ 1/2000 second, ISO 2000. Enjoy! – David