This emotional mother son dance at Château Le Parc gave me quite a few opportunities to create beautiful imagery and this is just one example. During the reception, while after the first dance, the MC announced the father daughter dance followed by the mother son dance.
I know for a fact that the parents dances present a beautiful opportunity to catch some of the most emotional moments of the wedding day.
During the mother son dance, the live band surrounded the mother and the groom so I can get a few beautiful shots alternating focus between the band and the groom and his mother. Still, in order to be the best wedding photographer possible, one has to think out-of-the-box and this is an example of what one can achieve when one thinks different.
Instead of focusing on the obvious subject of this photograph, the couple dancing, I noticed the father of the groom cry in the background. As such, I focused on him and waited for the right moment to present itself. When the groom, hugged his mother, in the end of the song, I capture this beautiful image. When I first edited the pictures, I thought this was the missed focus situation but soon I realized that the subject of the frame is the father. This unusual situation makes the viewer roam around the frame perimeter until he finds the point of focus or the subject in this image, the father. That struggle to find the subject creates tension in the image increases the value of this beautiful photograph.
The composition is centric with the couple dancing placed in the middle of the frame, while on the left we have the saxophone player and to balance him visually we have the father on the right hand side of the picture.
In post production I do quite a bit of work because at this wedding venue the spotlights illuminate the dance floor and leave the guests in the dark. As such I had to do a bit of exposure adjustment to make the father of the groom visible. In my opinion, this was a worthy effort as a created an image that the bride and groom were happy to include in their wedding album.
Another challenge I faced in post processing was colour correcting the picture. The event space has several lights of different colour temperatures and when they all shine, human skin can look strange due to the white balance colour shifts.
Location: 1745 Langstaff Rd, Concord, ON L4K 2H2.
