This cold image comes from Petra Hall in Sweden!
My couple Maria and David decided to get married in the coldest month of the year here in northern Sweden, i.e. in February. Not only is it cold in February, but we also don’t have many hours of daylight. It was a bit of a struggle to separate the bride’s white clothes from the snow, so I used a fill flash. The light was very nice and soft that day mostly due to snow clouds, and the fill flash helped to enhance the dress by making it warmer in comparison to the surrounding snow and ice. In this particular image we were lucky to have the clouds scatter for a few minutes and gave us a bit of blue sky. The sky reflects on the snow and makes it blue normally, but I did make the snow even bluer in post processing, to add to the cold feeling of the image you see here.
These entries come from Sara at Whitebox Weddings!
The bride, Kristen, is an actress and a make-up junkie. This ring shot was taken on the cover of one of her favorite books, Making Faces, by makeup artist Kevin Naucoin.
We were waiting for Kristen to get the finishing touches on her makeup so we played around with a few different ring set ups, but this was our favorite. Melanie is the detail specialist of our dynamic duo, so she used the Canon 5D with the 100 macro to get this fun and quirky shot. Window light created the soft light. There was not much to do in photoshop other than slightly adjust the levels and do a little bit of dodging and burning on the details.
This is a filmstrip that we created using a series of 3 photos that were taken just after Carrie and Eric’s ceremony. They had such a cool wedding. The weekend long event took place at a camp in the mountains of NC. We shoot as a team. Usually we are both shooting with different focal length lenses or from different angels, but during this moment Melanie was using the 5D with the 50mm 1.4 and I was talking to the couple…..you will never know what we were talking about, but don’t you wish you were there! In photoshop we used some of the amazing Boutwell totally rad actions. We like to use the boring black and white action and warm it up a bit. We also added some grain to these images. The filmstrip border is one of David Jay’s showit borders.
These images come from Ed Pingol in San Francisco
about 10 minutes after the sun sets is when this image was shot. it was getting pretty dark so i had to crank up the iso a bit to 800. dragged the shutter to .10th second hand held and flash was triggered via pocket wizard. the strobe used is a very old SB-24 (very cheap - buy one) mounted on a mono pod held by my lovely wife. the flash settings was at 24mm wide 1/16th power.
shooting agains the sun, camera setting was 100iso 250th @ f/13 (i believe it was). flash setting is at full power, 50mm zoom and was triggered by pocket wizard held 5ft from the ground by my brother. my wife was just watching and holding jasmin’s purse for this particular shot. the tube was this huge-ribbed thingie which gaives us those cool circles.
camera setting was 100iso 30th @ f19. this smooths out the water falling and also gives us enough ambient light to light the whole scenery. monica, my wife is hiding behind the falling water on the left side (notice i didn’t clone her out so you can see her head) holding a SB-24 triggered by a pocket wizard mounted on a monopod.
This image comes from Jeff Schmitt in Seattle.
I photographed this image using the Canon 5D with a 24mm-70mm lens at 44mm,
ISO 320, shutter 200, and F/3.2. I used a 580 flash to help fill in the
natural light. Their wedding was on June 23rd, 2007 at the Bellingham Ferry
Terminal, very cool location with great light. After converting this image
from RAW I added a duplicate layer and used a gaussian blur filter to get
that light defused glowing effect. Simple and easy.
This image was submitted by Greg Akoury of Oceanview Photography.
this shot was taken of the ringbearer before the ceremony. he was hanging close to the bride when I framed my shot and waited for him to look at me. sure enough he did and I snapped it. in PS i corrected the white balance, tweaked the levels to bring out the darker tones and saturated the colors using a hue/saturation layer. next i added a good amount of contrast and finished up with a custom vignette. the vignette was done by copying the layer, filling the new layer with black, making a round selection using the marquee tool, feathering the selection at 150 and then clearing out the selection (all on the copied layer) a la scott kelby.
This entry comes from Oleksandr Havrylyuk of Portland
I took this shot using Canon 100 mm 2.8 macro lens, which I got not so
long ago and used only 2 times before on the other weddings to photograph
rings. On that wedding, bride and groom where getting ready at the same
church but in separate rooms. They also were going to have a reception in
big church hall. I went to take groom’s ring from him and when I was
passing by the reception hall entry, I have noticed those cake trays that
cake lady brought to put small cakes on them. They where flat plastic
trays. The idea to use one of them as shooting table for rings came to me
immediately. So, I borrowed the tray for couple of minutes. I arranged
rings on the tray and I mounted my camera on a tripod. I was doing all of
that in the room with girls getting ready. They have brought some
refreshments with them in a blue cooler which was on the floor right in
front of me at the same direction I was shooting my rings. The light, the
angle and background and stars arranged so perfectly for that shot. The
color from the cooler created those deep blue shadows from the rings. I
used manual focus and timer release to get the shot. The post processing
was minimal here. I didn’t even crop the image. I just ran Clarity action
from Kubota’s Production Pack and it was it.
One quick note on the “Cool Photo” Contest - the entries must be submitted by July 4, 2007.
This entry was contributed by Carter Rose of Dallas in Focus.
The day of the wedding was thunderstorms like I had never seen. There were thirty mile an hour winds and pounding rain. We had plans to do the group portraits outside, but with the weather I knew it was going to be almost impossible. I had the idea to take this composite shot of the groom and groomsmen when I was walking in to the church behind them. I stayed outside and took 7 or 8 frames of various parts of the front of the church. I then went out and had them stand in the center with there umbrellas took three quick frames and ran back inside. Once at home I sowed the pictures together , and I realized I had not used my flash on the any shot but the middle one, so in order to gain consistency I had to manufacture some rain drops. In the end the groom loved the shot, and I was pretty happy with the overall look and feel of the shot(s).
These images are courtesy of Nick Rubalcaba of Rebecca Rubalcaba Photography in Visalia, California.
While waiting and hanging out with the boys in an
upstairs “game room” setting, one of the groom’s
nephews jumped on the drums and started banging away.
I definitely wanted to capture that and attempt some
motion blur. With flash on, I drug the shutter a
little and was able to get this picture. I brought the
photo into Lightroom and played with some various
settings, finishing it off with some “curves” adjustment in
Photoshop.
The 2nd photo is of our bride and groom, from
upstairs, looking down into the lobby area. My wife
was doing the directing of the photos and I noticed
the railing in front of me. I wanted to frame them
with it and have them in the center “ring” area. I
think I was able to get the desired result. I really
didn’t like “feel” of it in color so I converted to
B&W (using Lightroom), with some final contrast/curves adjustment in
Photoshop.
This image comes from Ramiro Rodriguez of Rosy’s Photography in the Chicago area.
This is Tracy, the best bride ever. She is just too cool, very sweet, very laid back, very relaxed, and ton’s of fun. You can see in her subtle smile how much she is enjoying her wedding. I was walking around shooting pictures from different angles, but this is one of my favorites. I like it because of the soft wrap around light that was accomplished by having the window behind her, I like the smile and the look in her eye coming through the veil. As for post processing, I only added a curves layer on Soft Light at around 40% opacity, I de-saturated the image to give it a bit of character, and I added the Angle Glow action from Kevin Kubota and reduced the opacity to about 50%. The last step was done only to enhance the wrap around light from the window.