Candid Photos in San Francisco
We always try to have our wedding pictures tell the story of the day in a natural and candid way. ThiI love this type of photo to help show the environment of any San Francisco destination. Walking shots are one day to accomplish this. We call it a walking shot and we basically just want our bride and groom to walk through the environment enjoying each other’s company while looking around at the scenery. The Palace of Fine Arts is one great place to do this and often bring our couples here after their San Francisco City Hall wedding photo session is complete. For this type of walking shot I feel like it makes it particularly effective if you use a wider angle lens. In this way, the viewer of the image gets to see what the bride and groom are seeing as they walk through the environment. To make the photo look even more natural, we ask the couple not to look at the camera and not to look at each other too much. After all, normally when you’re walking you aren’t staring at your companion. Instead, you are looking where you’re going while viewing the beautiful scenery.
Walking Towards the Camera Works Well Also
We also like to have our SF City Hall newlyweds walk towards us. This provides a couple of things…. First, you are able to see a different angle and different scenery, and second it allows you to see the back of the bride’s wedding dress when they turn around and walk away from us. Over the years, we have discovered that the more angles you can display of the wedding dress, the better! In addition, the movement in the dress provided by walking also shows different attributes of the gown that wouldn’t have other wise been noticed. Trains move around the in the wind, veils blow up and out away from the bride and you see many different angles of the wedding dress. We will even have brave brides run with their dress on and that can really make things look amazing.
Candid San Francisco Wedding Photography
The other aspect of San Francisco City Hall wedding photography that a photo like this helps with is the bride and groom’s desire to have candid photos of their marriage. Candid photos are a very common request we receive from our couples before we photograph their City Hall marriage. Everyone seems to want lots of candid and natural type photos. We always do the best we can to accomplish this for them but given the nature of City Hall weddings it’s not always possible to capture a great many. The reason for this is that there is no wedding reception and oftentimes there are no guests. So it limits the wedding photographer to showing interaction between the bride and groom and also trying to create moments that look candid . The walking shot is a perfect way to do this and so we always ask the couple to take a leisurely stroll for us. To be honest it seems like walking is our couple’s favorite thing to do during a wedding shoot. It gives them a chance to not have to pose and to just enjoy their day. This is another reason we tend to wait until the latter part of the wedding photography session to do the walking shots. By that time the bride and groom are sometimes tired of posing and are ready for something more relaxing.
Checking in at the SF County Clerk – Candid Moment
This image is not one you often see when it comes to City Hall wedding photography in San Francisco. It is actually captured while the couple is waiting to check-in at the county clerk’s office at City Hall. This area is often quite busy with people walking back and forth trying to take care of various legal matters. The County Clerk it’s not just for marriage’s but they also handle birth certificates, death certificates, and passports. Because of that, it’s very difficult to get a picture like this without a lot of people in the background. UPDATE: With the County Clerk reopening following the Corona Virus Pandemic, it is no longer possible to obtain photos quite like this, but we have come up with other ways to do it. City Hall has rightly limited access to this part of building for health and safety reasons.
Telling the Story of Their Wedding Day
I enjoy capturing photos of the couple checking in because it helps tell the story of the day for the couple. When you get married at San Francisco City Hall there are a number of steps you have to complete in order to get to the ceremony. These details are covered in other parts of this website, to learn more click How to Get Married at SF City Hall. To quickly summarize, it involves first obtaining your marriage license and then you need to check in for your ceremony. After those two steps all you need to do is meet with the officiant and have your witness sign the marriage license. Once all these steps have been completed the bride and groom and guests all head to the Rotunda where the ceremony will take place.
With this couple we thought it would be fun to capture all the different steps with wedding photographs. For this wedding, we took pictures of the couple all along the way including when they went to the front desk at the county clerk to check in. As you can see from the photo below they were a very happy couple and really enjoyed all aspects of their wedding photography session. Similar to all of our city hall couples, once the ceremony was complete we took them on a photo tour of the building and covered all four floors. We made sure to incorporate many photos that told the story of the day to keep with the candid nature of photos that they wanted.
Our Next Step was to take them to the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco where we obtained additional romantic images of both of them. It was a lovely day and we had such a great time with this couple. We finished up at Fort Point to obtain some amazing Golden Gate Bridge pictures. This couple was really committed to receiving the best possible wedding photography coverage, including some major aspects of San Francisco beauty and romance. Even though it is a bit of a time commitment, the results are worthwhile. I would also add that this couple went all out on their attire as well. The groom wearing a very smart tuxedo and the bride wearing a tea length dress with beautiful flowers.
