Once in awhile Jennie and I will have a big idea.  The Midsummer Night’s dress shoot was one of those.  The idea, 5 dresses hanging over a beautiful stream.  Smoke blown into the trees was to capture the streaming sunlight painting ethereal rays over the scene.  Well, mother nature didn’t agree with our plan.  A calm early morning gave way to an unreliable, omni-directional breeze.  No amount of smoke would fill the canopy and if it did, it would have found it’s way in front of the dresses ruining the image.  It did work for one image…click on ‘more’ below the image for the rest of the story…

As photographers, Jennie and I have had to adapt to the constant changes of everything from environment, to lighting, to conditions beyond our control and even more difficult, our expectations.  We had dreamt up a shot that in almost all ways should have been set in a huge hollywood soundstage.  We dreamt big for this shoot and designed even bigger.  The smoke was the key to the shot.  Like I said earlier it wasn’t going to happen.  Rather than pull everything down, we rethought the scene and re-engineered our expectations to make what we feel are still some pretty cool images…

So, did we take 6 hours or so of our lives to set up and prepare for this shoot, yep.  Did we really go through all that for what panned out to be 2 great images, yep. Was there other stuff we could probably process into some really neat stuff, sure.  But what we learned as a couple of photographers was that we can change our expectations mid-stream, pun intended.

Tags: rustic, shoot, Wedding, wedding dresses
Posted in Miscellaneous, Shoots