Portrait of a Bride

[Avangard Photography]

Does it work for you or not?

[Marko]

First off - welcome to the forum.
Your image, It does not work for me even though the lighting on the bride is good.
The bride's parents paid 3 grand for that dress and people want to see it.
You cropped the dress and instead included a huge expanse of blank wall.
Nobody cares about the wall.
Hope that may help.

[theantiquetiger]

First, welcome!!!

I agree with Marko, besides the bride, the most important thing in the wedding is the dress (probably more than the groom).

There is WAY too much background and her position in the frame is not working. If you would just crop out the ridge of bricks on the right side of the frame, it would be a lot better, more uniformity.

Another thing I see is her expression. She looks uncomfortable. This is supposed to be her happiest day of her life, make sure you capture it.

[christopher steven b.]

Your bride doesn't know anything about how to hold a bouquet--what normal people do, right ? But I think you should have got her to drop it down a bit so you can at least see the shape of the top portion of her dress. I forget to do this far too often.

The negative space is a little weird, but I think weirdness is allowed. Not every shot has to show the entire dress--I'm sure you have others that do. The trendy (and I use this as an epithet) processing that doesn't make much sense for print seems counter productive here, because if you're showing off the texture of the wall, flattening the shadows seems to work against that a little.

[Michaelaw]

Well, I love bricks but not much on brides so...Yeah it works for me

[Avangard Photography]

Here is the photo as it was taken. I was just experimenting with the square cropping. Thanks for your all comments.

[theantiquetiger]

Great original, but like i said in my post above, I would crop in just a tad to get rid of the line of bricks on the right. It attracts my eye to it, stealing from the bride.

[Lorey]

I like this original as it was taken except it's still just a little too much on the top. I'd take it little off but not a lot. The lighter line of bricks on the right is so subtle that it's not really a distraction to me. A great job on processing too.

[Runmonty]

I actually quite like it and like the unconventional composition. In fact I would even suggest going a little more extreme with a 4 x 6 vertical crop with her located just off centre to the right (let me know if you would like me to show you what I mean)

Please bear in mind I am no wedding photographer, and perhaps from a traditional wedding perspective I get what the others are saying, but if you have plenty of the dress and several other more traditional shots then why not push the boundaries like this for those extra shots.

I like the processing too.

[Ernst-Ulrich Schafer]

I too like the lst crop myself. Sure the masses want to see the dress, but your the photographer and how you see is more important than the masses. The hands are strong and we want soft hands when it comes to posing a pretty girl. On the other hand ;-) strong hands in a portrait can make that image.