At SF City Hall Wedding Photography By Michael, we love all of our brides and grooms and always make sure we work hard to get great images of all of them. However, every once in a while we are lucky enough to book a couple that are naturals in front of the camera. The couple featured on this blog included a groom who had recently taken Ball Room dancing lessons and a bride who was a professional Ballerina. Dancing and posing for pictures definitely have many similarities.
We had a fantastic time with this couple at San Francisco City Hall with them booking our City Hall PLUS package. The PLUS package provides our clients with 1.5 hours of coverage and includes plenty of time for family photos after the ceremony is completed. This is especially important if you have a large guest count and want group photos of all of them in various combinations. This city hall wedding photography package also provides ample time to visit all 4 floors of this historic building. We always recommend this package for couples with guests to also allow ample time to interact with all of them. Otherwise, we would almost have to go right into the photoshoot since the Elopement package on only includes 1 hour of photographic coverage.
To make things even more fun for this wedding, the bride wore a unique wedding dress that you don’t normally see at San Francisco City Hall. It was a totally fun dress and matched the personality of the woman wearing it. I remember when we were trying to meet up for the first time, I asked her how I would recognize her. She said, don’t worry you will! Just look for the red dress she told me. Here is what the dress looked like:
San Francisco City Hall Civil Ceremony Coverage
Once the ceremony took place in the Rotunda we made sure to cover the entire event from start to finish. We usually capture many full length photos of the couple saying their vows and then we zoom in close for pictures of the ring exchange. It’s also quite important to try to capture the expressions and emotions of the bride and groom as they go through the ceremony in front of their friends and relatives.
My assistant photographer, Lily, will often cover the ceremony from up above looking down on the couple in the Rotunda area. This provides a unique angle which not only shows the bride and groom going through their Civil wedding ceremony, but also their friends and relatives looking on. Once we capture the first kiss then we begin to photograph a few formal groups shots of their family and friends. The family members were all amazing and absolutely supportive of us and our wedding photography efforts. We spent some time talking to them and discussing some of the finer points of SF City Hall weddings and then we took the bride and groom around the building for their private photo tour.
SF City Hall Wedding Photography Tour
We visited every single floor of City Hall starting with the Grand Staircase and then up to the 2nd Floor to obtain some images in the hallway. We knew we had to make sure we took them up to the 3rd floor to take advantage of the beautiful window light so we headed there next. Here is one of our window shots! Notice the soft light on her face which is directional but not harsh at all. For this particular wedding, some of our best images came from this floor. Every wedding is different and you never really know where the favorite spots will be. It was quite evident after we completed this shoot because we really loved these images! It is all about the light, and it was amazing that day on the 3rd floor.
We finished up on the spectacular 4th Floor North Gallery at city hall, which is probably the most beautiful location in the building for natural light. It was here that we took advantage of our client’s posing talents and tried some dance related wedding photography poses. The 2 of them pulled off all of our dance inspired poses with relative ease. These are the same poses that we often warn our clients about beforehand in case it is too challenging for them. Afterward, I realized I should have asked them for more input on dance poses since they were the experts. They seemed pleased with what we came up so it was all good. We took a number of bride and groom shots on this floor including this one below:
We also needed to include some romantic wedding photos to show the close connection between the bride and groom. This kind of posing is quite easy when your couple has a close bond with each other. Often times romantic poses almost create themselves and that was definitely the case for this wedding. In other words, it takes very little suggesting from us to show their closeness and love for each other. To be perfectly honest, most of the romantic poses and great dance shots in these photos were created by the couple. We were lucky enough to be there to capture them to add to their memories.
We finished up our photo shoot in typical fashion by taking the couple to the Famous San Francisco City Hall sign on the Polk Street entrance to the building. Below are a few more shots from other San Francisco city hall weddings that we would like to share with you.
