SF Palace of Fine Arts

Bride and Groom Kiss Photography

This photo was taken on the 4th floor North Gallery at San Francisco City Hall. This area is a favorite of many City Hall wedding photographers because of it's beautiful natural light and wide open feel. The challenge here is to try to take the photo when there's nobody on the other side distracting from the image. The building can be quite busy at times and so you have to pick your spots. To be honest, in this particular photo we removed a couple of tourists in the background using Photoshop. This of course, can be very time-consuming so it's preferable to capture this image when nobody is on the other side. One thing that helped us with this photo is that the couple had rented out the entire fourth floor balcony for their reserved wedding. They paid the thousand dollars and reserved the north side for their family and friends. The City Hall event Department will allow you to have the space for one hour. So for that time period, no other wedding photographers or tourists can invade your space. We were able to take advantage of this and get some great photos of the couple in various poses including this kissing shot. Since I brought up the subject of kissing photography let's talk about that for a moment.

Kissing Images of Newlyweds

Any photographer who has photographed multiple marriages understands that part of the process involves having their couple kissing each other. Despite the fact that this appears to be no big deal it sometimes can be. Not all couples want to kiss in front of the camera and certain others don't want to do it in front of their parents. This may sound surprising but there are cultures that find this practice to be inappropriate. In the vast majority of situations it's perfectly fine to ask your newlywed couples to kiss during the formal photo shoot. I would caution any photographer to not overdo it by asking the couple to kiss over and over again. Occasionally, We will run into a couple who prefers not to kiss on command. That is perfectly fine and there are many other poses we can do that show the Romantic relationship between the two Newlyweds. We just need to be ready in case they tell us they don't want to do it. We have talked about this before, but another good reason for doing the engagement session before the wedding is that some of these types of things can be discovered and adjusted for.