Bridal & Vintage Fashion Photo Shoot

A few weeks ago I answered a casting call looking for a photographer interested in doing a Bridal fashion photo shoot in Kilkenny.

Shortly after that, I met up with Make Up Artist Dawn Ryan and Hair Stylist Deirdre Esmonde Walsh to chat about the shoot. We set a date for it and over the next few weeks, four models were organised along with a selection of bridal wear, vintage dresses & headpieces supplied by Cameo Bridal Wear and Rebekah Patterson.

The Sunday before last, we all met up in the Hair Court to prepare for the shoot, we were joined by Cork photographer Ger Leahy. Our models; Grace Baker, Shelly Baker, Joanna Szendera and Mairead Moran tried on various outfits before Dawn and Deirdre set to work on hair & make up. Myself and Ger killed the time, shooting some behind the scenes shots and worrying about the blinding sun outside.

Once the girls were good to go, we moved to our first shoot location, the old TeaRooms Bridal Shop beside the river across from Dunnes car park. It was about 29 degrees at this stage and the sun proved to be a huge problem to shoot in, leaving us with the only option of shooting in the small shaded doorway area.

Unfortunately, despite having checked my kit the night before and everything was fine, I couldn’t get one of my wireless triggers to work properly, meaning I could only shoot with one wireless flash, my SB800. I kept it simple for the start, with the SB800 positioned on the ground in front of the girls at 1/4 power shooting on my 18-135mm. With the limited shoot space, we didn’t stay long in the location, moving to the shaded canal area beside the castle.

The second location was a lot better for shooting, plenty of shade and room to move around. The only small problems being the amount of attention the girls were getting, featuring of course the obligatory Kilkenny chav’s throwing some abuse, but the girls paid no attention and I had a lot of fun playing with settings and different strength flash bursts.

Unfortunately, my one working wireless trigger started acting up at this stage so I had to resort to using my SB800 on camera for a while. I swapped around between my 18-135mm and 50mm for various shots but just couldn’t find the right settings to stop the sky burning out in the background whilst keeping the girls lit.

Post-wise I did some selective desaturation on the background of some of these shots. My trigger had started working again so I tried some more strobist stuff against the wall of the castle, with the SB800 positioned to the left of the camera at either 1/4 or 1/2 power. I also did some sign replacements, removing the writing and graffiti off the Water Depth sign and adding a silhouette of the model.

Finally, we moved to our third location, just inside the grounds of the Castle Park. We found a nice spot in the woods with the sun coming through the trees providing a nice back light, we shot a mixture of group and individual shots with SB800 at 1/2 power. Then called it a day.

You can check out my favourite shots from the shoot here on the Oss237.com Homepage with links to over 70 photos on my Flickr. As always any comments or feedback are appreciated.

Finally, I’d like to say thanks to Dawn, Deirdre, Grace, Shelly, Joanna and Mairead for all their time and hard work, I really enjoyed the shoot, I hope you like the photographs and I look forward to hopefully working with you all again in the future.