dress shot tutorial
Shooting the dress in less than FOUR frames Mr. Moto in Danger Island trailer .
It can be done! Here’s how:
Scope out the situation, look around the room- where can I put the dress where it won’t get wrinkled or dirty? A window? A doorframe?
I chose the window. But. I am SO over shooting it hanging it just in the window. Like. Blah. Here I am. A dress. In the window. Just hanging.
So what do you do?
An easy way to spice it up is shoot a reflection of it in the window. Still. It harkens back to the times of 1984, in my mind.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers dvdrip
So I get my camera settings in the ballpark of where I think I need to be.
camera: Nikon D3
Lens: 24-70mm 2.8 – I chose this lens because I needed a wide enough lens to show the whole scene
ISO 500 / @32mm / f 2.8 / 1/250 sec
I notice that there is a school picture there and it is cutting off the dress, which I want to feature. So that won’t work. There is also clutter in the left side of the frame, and I don’t like the ceiling fan showing.
The top image was also a little dark so I bump my ISO to 800. What I should have done was drop my shutter to keep my ISO low. Which to me, is always better. But that is my preference!
I also stand up higher to eliminate the ceiling fan, and scooted to the right to get rid of the left side clutter.
The Long Kiss Goodnight trailer Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls full movie
oh yeah! I scooted alright
The bride’s Mom came into the room and I asked her who the people in the photos were- the bride was her grandmother, and the other one was her sister. No offense to the sister, but I gave her the boot, and kept the image of the grandmother to keep the image cleaner. It still felt cluttered to me, so I decided to change my composition a bit more drastically once I realized what I wanted to feature in the frame:
the dress, out of focus in the back
the window shape
the image of her grandmother in the foreground
and that is it!
I changed my focal length a little- I went from 32mm to 40mm
Almost done! But compositionally it is right where I want it. But still not done, to me.
Ta-DA! OK, now it’s done! I warmed it up a little, and sharpened it, deepened the contrast and threw a little vignette to draw your eye in to where I want you to look
Happy dress shooting!!
carla – your instincts are so on point. i don’t know if my mom told you, but that was our grandmother who was unable to attend due to the health of our grandfather. that makes this image all the more special; she is now memorialized as part of aleks’ special day.
These are awesome! I am just sad that I can’t click more than one “favorite” button.
Wow, how ubberly cool a pink dress! Um, no offense but don’t you find it difficult to stand higher sometimes? Just sayin’ Oh and I can say it because I am vertically challenged too, LOL
Oh good! When I saw the first photo, I thought that was it with my ugly middle school picture in it! The final product is beautiful. I am so anxious to see all the photos from my sister’s wedding!
Thank you for being thoughtful and helpful! That was a beautiful shot you got at the end.
Awesome!
LOVE THIS POST!!! Love the picture and love getting inside your head!
Sweet walk through of your thought process! I am considering myself challenged to shoot a better dress shot this weekend! If you guys have not taken Carla’s workshop…sign up. It was awesome!
Love the results! You ended up with a gorgeous image. Thanks for sharing your thought process!
I LOVE that you go through ALL that thought processing in a flash! Your instincts are AWESOME