At any wedding, detail shots are important. Most of our photos at San Francisco city hall will be of the bride and groom, but it is also important to record all of the hard work that the wedding party, caterers, and florists put into a typical wedding. In the photo above, the wedding rings were the obvious main subject, but we also wanted to reference the bridal bouquet in the background. Even though its blurred, you know what it is! There are a couple different ways to pull off a good detail shot, especially at San Francisco city hall. One way is to use a macro lens and focus very close on the subject and try to make the entire subject clear and easy to see. Utilizing a high F-stop (F11 for example) will help make this possible be providing greater depth-of-field. In the photo above, we did just the opposite. We used a lower f-stop of F1.8 to provide a shallow depth-of-field. We wanted a shallow depth-of-field in this shot because the main focus were the newlyweds' wedding rings. By making sure they were sharply focused with the background blurred, more emphasis is placed on the rings. You can see how nicely they stand out from the background, which would have taken away from their beauty. In other words, if we were to try to make everything in focus, the rings could get a little lost. The other way to accomplish this is by placing the background (in this case the bridal bouquet) farther away from the main subject in the distant background. We also did this to some extent in this particular wedding photograph. This technique also results in a softer background and provides less distraction. Our San Francisco city hall couples frequently ask us to provide them with detail shots of specific memorabilia and other important items and we are happy to oblige. There are many different ways to accomplish and San Francisco city hall gives us all kinds of great options to complete our still life set ups.
Other types of wedding detail photography - reception shots using alternative backgrounds
