I was looking through some wedding photos for an upcoming photography talk on Twitter ( #togchat ) and I stumbled on this image from a wedding a shot a few years ago.
Let me say I am not a wedding photographer, the mere thought makes me shudder but looking through the shots from that day brought a thought to the surface.
“The devil is in the detail”, a phrase most of us would have heard or said at some point but do we remember it when chaos surrounds us? The reception for the wedding was taking place in Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, a Georgian Mansion and a stunning location and depicts the decoration on the backs of the chairs.
I had bent down to change lenses when I saw the bow on the nearest chair illuminated by sunlight streaming through the large windows and grabbed a shot which, for me, sums up the flavour of the day itself. It was a small wedding set in a grand location where the organisers has made sure that the details were all taken care of.
As a photographer I sometimes suffer with preconceived ideas of how a shot will look or a shoot progress and that’s generally a good thing but we need to be open to possibilities, to taking things in a new direction, to seeing the small details that add so much to the overall image.
Processing
I shot this as a JPEG and processing was entirely in Lightroom, after adjusting white balance and cropping a little from the top of the frame I increased highlights and white settings to give a high key effect and decreased overall clarity to defocus the image a touch. I then masked the bow using the brush tool and painted back clarity on this section.
Excellent processing, Chris.
Thanks Andy, appreciate the comment
Love the tones and hues here, Chris, very warm! Great job on the production of this one, my good friend!
Thanks Toad, in honesty it was an easy shot to process