"Stormy Days Ahead"

"Stormy Days Ahead"
© David A. Ziser

OK, this doesn’t look like a very romantic wedding image.  Add to that the title I’ve selected for this image, it doesn’t even sound like the marriage is going to last.

Call it all poetic license – I just like the very dramatic look to the photograph.  It was our second day shooting in Florida and the sky just wasn’t going to yield a rich blue sky with white puffy clouds.

How did I pull it off?  It was pretty easy.  The first secret is to use a very wide angle lens because it gives you such a wide perspective and really draws the clouds into the scene.  The second secret is determining the exposure for the over all scene and then underexposing the scene a bit to add the drama to the sky.

The exposure on the bride was created with my off camera flash coming in from camera right.  The challenge was this.  Since I was using such a small aperture, I needed to get the strobe close enough to the bride to establish the proper exposure on her face.  In reality, part of my assistant was actually in the photograph along with my strobe and monopod on the right hand side of the image.

Whenever your light source is in the photograph, be sure to place it in a “Photoshop-able” part of the scene.  The light and part of my assistant could be seen in the clouds on the right.  But with a quick application of PS CS5 “content aware fill”, they were easily removed in a matter of seconds leaving me with this dramatic wedding image.

Camera specs: Canon 7D fitted with Sigma 8-16mm lens at 8mm, F14 @ 1/320 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David