From the course: Wedding Photography: Bridal Portraits

A roadmap overview to the course

We have an exciting educational adventure ahead of us. And because of that, here I thought it would be helpful to provide you with a bit of a road map overview of what lies ahead. You know this course is part of larger series, Wedding Photography For Everyone. And in the first installment of our series, we focused in on the basics, on the fundamentals. And there we brought up this whole idea that you can divide a wedding up into different phases or stages. Well here in this course, we're going to focus in on one of those phases and this is bridal portraiture, and typically bridal portraits they happen before or after the ceremony. And frequently you have a very limited amount of time in order to craft and create these very important pictures. So here, what we're going to do is a live photo shoot. We're going to do a live photo shoot in this sense we're going to stretch out time, slow things down. In order to bring up complexity, variety, and different strategies that we can then take when we're trying to create good bridal portraits. And you know, we're doing this intentionally, and here's why. No two weddings are alike. Some weddings are very simple, they're in someone's back yard. Others are very elaborate. So what I want to do is introduce different strategies that we can use when working with natural and available light that will work regardless with the type of wedding that we're photographing. You'll also discover that we'll be working with one of my good friends, Cara. Cara is engaged to be married in two short months, and she'll be our bride. And in a sense I mention that because what we're doing is we're practicing bridal portraiture, and this is something that any of us can do. When it comes to getting good at wedding photography, practice really makes perfect. And one of the things that you'll encounter in this course that as we practice, we'll go out on location, capture and create interesting photographs in different scenarios, different lighting situations. Then we'll also come back here to the studio, and we'll talk about what we've done, we'll reflect back on our photographs. In other words we'll do both of these things in order to become better wedding photographers. Now as we go out on location, we're going to explore how to work with that location and also how to work with our bride Cara, and how to work with our theme which is vintage nautical. And that's why we have all of these items here. So as we go out on this journey, one of the things that you'll discover is that some of the movies will be fun to just sort of watch. You'll kick back and enjoy them. Others, you'll want to scribble and take down notes. Well, our educational adventure will begin as we look at how we can plan ahead before a bridal shoot. And we'll pick that up in the next chapter, so I'll look forward to seeing you there.

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