What makes a good photograph? Because photography in general tends to be a static art form, the obvious challenge is to make it come alive. Any good composition will contain a number of important elements including a main subject, a light source, background and some sort of story. The photo above contains all of these elements. The main subject is, of course, the bride. We have a beautiful window and columns for a background and the light source is reflective light coming from the same window. But what is the story in this image? In my view, the story is that the bride is twirling with joy as she celebrates her recent nuptials. The large train on the wedding dress shows this movement because of the texture and the way it flows. We could not have set up a photo like this in a static way. The only way to truly capture the movement is to actually have the bride spinning. We asked Andrea to spin 3 or 4 times and we just kept shooting. This was the winning image! In some cases the best image is the one where we can't see the bride's face. This is one of our favorite poses we like to use to highlight our San Francisco city hall brides.
