Photographing a wedding can be a hectic affair, and as you try to maintain a calm exterior, inside you can be up to ninety as the challenge of not only photographing the wedding day, but dealing with the logistics of doing so, weighs on your mind. The perfect antidote to this is to slow things down, and take control of the pace of events, and while that’s not always possible, when it is it can lead to you capturing some great moments of the day on camera.
I was lucky enough to experience this at Cait’s wedding last month. I posted a photograph of Cait already this week, taken towards the end of the morning, to specifically illustrate a post about window light, and the photograph above, which is my favourite from the entire wedding, was begging to be posted also, so here it is.
For this wedding I travelled to Galway the night before, and was at Cait’s house quite early in the morning with lots of time before the ceremony. Part of the reason behind this was to get a photo of Cait with her son, who would be heading off to be minded by his grandfather while his mother got ready. Also though I hoped that getting there early would make the morning all the more relaxed, and keep me calm on the inside as well as on the outside.
The plan worked and there was time for plenty of photos, but also time to relax and chat to Cait, her family and her bridesmaids. In the middle of the morning, as Cait was having her hair done, I found myself looking for an angle for a photograph. I made my way around the back bedroom in which the hair dressing was being done, and lowered myself down both to stay out of the way, and to get a better composition for what was to be a photograph of Cait looking in the mirror.
Just before I went to take the photo I heard her sister Fiona coming up the stairs, and something instinctively told me to stop and wait. Because I was pacing the morning nicely, I could afford to wait and see what photograph might present itself. If none did, well I wouldn’t have lost valuable shooting time either.
Tbe photo that presented itself made this investment time, a precious resource on the morning of a wedding, pay dividends. What happened (and what I had hoped would happen as I waited) was that Fiona stuck her head around the door to see how the hair was coming along. As she did, I clicked the shutter, having pre-focused and set my exposure while I waited for the shot earlier.
It was only afterwards that I noticed the camera in Fiona’s hand – another little element in the photograph that tells a story – and much like the window-lit portrait from earlier this week, the natural light, bouncing off the mirror in front of Cait, was such that very little post-processing had to be done to the shot to bring it to what you see here.
All in all a fortuitous shot that required little or no effort or skill other than good timing and a little bit of foresight to become a personal favourite.
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