Final Practice Examples

I would like to end this chapter with a few more practice session examples that will whet your appetite for practicing your craft. Each of these examples ends with a photograph taken at an actual wedding, using the skills I learned beforehand from the practice sessions.

Weeds or Plants

From photographing wedding clients in parks and random landscapes, I realized that I needed to learn how to use weeds to take visually interesting photographs. So weeds made it into my practice log (19.17).

19.17. After regularly encountering weeds while shooting clients outdoors, I added them to my practice log list.

Here’s an actual place where a bride and groom asked me to take photos (19.18). My practice sessions with weeds and plants had taught me that a wide-angle lens, with a shallow aperture such as f/1.2, was the way to go. Choosing a shooting angle below the plant would exaggerate the plant’s size and make it more interesting as a foreground element. In other words, the weeds were used to create a layering effect.