Tying the dress

I mentioned last week that I’m not naturally a black & white photographer – I tend to see things, photographically I mean, in colour.  Give me a colour and a monochrome version of the same photograph and I will usually favour the colour version.  When I shoot a wedding however, I do try to provide the bride and groom with images in both colour and monochrome, so that I am not pushing my personal tastes in this respect onto them.  Similarly, when I create their slideshow of highlights from the day, I choose a healthy mix of monochrome images for inclusion.  The decision about which images to choose in monochrome is rarely arbitrary.

This photograph from Eva & Jonathan’s wedding is a good example.  I’ll explain why in a moment, but first a little about the photograph itself, which is one of my favourites from the day.

I had been photographing Eva while she was having her make up done earlier in the morning, and taking photographs of the dress, shoes, flowers and jewellary also, as I normally do.   When the time came for Eva to get into the dress  I took the opportunity to catch up with Jonathan for a few shots of him getting ready, and returned to Eva as the back of the dress was being done up, with the help of some friends.

The morning of a wedding is probably my favourite part of the day to photograph, especially if the bride is as relaxed as Eva was, and she and the girls were having great fun as the dress was being done up.  As photographer I’m trying to be unobtrusive and to not interrupt the natural flow of conversation between the bride and her helpers, and just allow moments to occur that I can hopefully capture on my camera.

I will try not pose anyone or ask them to stand in a particular way for this part of the day, and there’s rarely a need to, as the photographs that result are natural.  All I need to think about, technically, is that there is enough light and that I’m using a suitable aperture for the depth of field I want.  In this case I needed a touch of fill flash to keep everyone out of shadow as the scene is backlit and I went for a wide aperture to throw the background out of focus.

This particular image works best in monochrome as opposed to in colour because the colour version has many distracting elements that take your eye away from the main area of interest – for instance the chairs and one of the girl’s dresses had quite strong colours.  Taking those out elements via a monochrome conversion leaves your eyes to wander less and helps the viewer to notice the expressions on the girls’ faces, which make the photo.