Shooting at golden hour is photographer nirvana. Most of the time, that means shooting at sunset, especially in the summer months when sunrise is so early in the morning. Shooting at sunrise in June, though, you get the benefit of cooler temperatures than in the afternoon and the fact most people are still in bed, so places that would otherwise be teeming with people are pretty much empty. So it was great to be able to meet up with Annie & Yuriy early in the morning a week or so back to shoot around Duke Chapel and Sarah P. Duke Gardens, where they will be getting married in a few short months. As you can see below, we pretty much had both places to ourselves, which allowed us to take our time and get some pretty unique images.
Readers of this blog will know that I shoot at these two locations a lot, so I’m always trying to come up with new approaches to just try something different. In this case, we started at the Chapel where Annie & Yuriy practised their tango moves in the arcades. From there, we headed over to the gardens for a quick walk and to visit the spot where they will be tying the knot. We finished up at the American Tobacco Campus to get some photos at the location where Yuriy popped the question a few months back. Annie wanted some fun shots of her chasing her man down, so we definitely got those too to finish off the session.
For photographers (and other people who might be interested), in order to keep myself challenged and deliver something unique for the client, I tried to shoot every single image in a new way. Firstly, I shot all the images using just three prime lenses: the Canon 50mm 1.2 on my Sony a7RII, and the 85mm 1.2 and 200mm 1.8 on my 1DX Mk II. We worked with adding in some movement in the arcade shots, natural light, supplemental lighting, creative focus in-camera, etc. All-in-all, it was a fun shoot and I’m really looking forward to Annie & Yuriy’s wedding in September.
Anyway, that’s enough from me, here are my picks of the pics…
