Door 10: Confetti
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 – 23mm 1.4 – 1/160sec – f/11 – ISO 12,800 – EF-X20 flash
Even if you only vaguely follow my blog or my social networking pages, you’re bound to know by now that this photograph from Cripps Stone Barn is a favourite of mine. If not, fair warning: this is a favourite of mine.
I mentioned on door 8 that I had been chosen as Fujifilm UK’s featured photographer for the week – something that I’m very happy about. This was another one of the images used during the week.
Here’s what I love about it: the confetti (quite hard to miss…), the bride and groom’s expressions, the hands creeping in to the picture and the guest’s faces in the background. They’re all elements that contribute towards me feeling proud of the image itself, but more than that, privileged to have been able to capture a moment as real as this.
A trick of the trade is to photoshop confetti in – it’s not that hard, it doesn’t take that long and it can make confetti pictures look a lot more busy if required. This isn’t something that I do, and I’m pleased to say that especially in this image, none of what you see is faked.
The black & white conversion was a pretty easy choice for me; I like the colour version but I felt like this one had a bit more ‘oomph’ for want of a better word.
Happy bride and groom. Happy guests. Happy photographer. This will be a favourite of mine for a long time to come.
On a side note for fellow photographers; this is in my opinion how chiaroscuro can work out for the better in wedding photography. Sometimes you want a slightly softer image in terms of contrast, but here I believe that the harsh shadows play well against the white confetti. I could have boosted the whites in lightroom a tiny bit more, but I wanted to retain as much detail as possible in the bright parts of the photograph. With the blacks being quite dark here, it didn’t seem necessary to take the whites too far.
