Your Love Has No Walls | Wedding Photography Tips

We’ve been sharing wedding photography tips the past couple a weeks. We’ve talked about weather and mountains specifically. Now it’s time to take a step back and look at the big picture of wedding photography tips for outdoor weddings. Since nature is where we and many of the couples we work with find inspiration, it makes sense that we photograph a lot of outdoor weddings. Where better to celebrate your love than amongst the trees or with views of the mountains or the coast? Something interesting to note is that we actually got married inside. Our ceremony was in a little Chapel in the mountains and our reception that was supposed to be on a deck outside by the river ended up inside in some building. And everyone had a blast, they even got to buy snow chains to head up into the mountains to play in the snow. This brings me to the first of our wedding photography tips for outdoor weddings.

Embrace the challenges:

If we truly love the outdoors, it probably doesn’t mean that we love the outdoors but only when it’s sunny. It probably isn’t true that we love nature but only when it’s clean. We love the outdoors including all the things that can go wrong. In fact, we might define things going wrong as excitement and adventure. We replace but with and. I love spring, the wildflowers are amazing and if it snows that’s cool too! A squirrel, a bird, an elk even, can crash your outdoor wedding. A strong breeze can blow your veil up in the air. All of these moments are perfect photo moments. Let the unknown and the unexpected excite you rather than add to your stress.

There are simple tricks we can do for photos:

Have the bride stand so that the wide blows the hair out of her face rather than into it.
If you remember back to our recent post on wedding weather, we can use fun lighting tricks to make things like fog look cool!

Plan for the light:

When you see amazing photos online take note of what time of day they were taken. Generally even the untrained eye can tell the difference between photos taken mid-day and photos taken at sunset. Obviously your whole wedding day cannot take place at sunset. Even so, for outdoor weddings you want to pay attention to the light for a variety of reasons. Not only is harsh lighting difficult to photograph but it can be uncomfortable for guests. We’ve been at weddings where the Groomsmen are standing in the sun, blinded by the light, and sweating while the Bridesmaids are in the shade shivering. We’ve been at weddings where the guests are staring at the sun and fighting over any seats that are in the shade. We’ve also been at weddings where the ceremony was strategically placed under a large shade tree or shade umbrellas were placed throughout the seating area. It simply takes forethought. There’s a balance between planning your wedding around when the light is pretty and planning it around when people might get hungry. Find the right balance for yourself and then make the best of it.

Again, there are simple camera tricks we can do for photos:

Shoot into the sun rather than having you squinting at it.
If we end up taking family photos mid-day, we try to find open shade or put your backs to the sun.
We can use a graduated filter strategically to increase our dynamic range, that’s how we are able to get a wide range of light and dark in one photo.

Thanks for stopping by for week 3 of our 5 week Wedding Photography Tip series! Hope you enjoyed these wedding photography tips for outdoor weddings. Here are wedding photography tips for beginners or how to price your wedding photography. Stay tuned: