One King West Hotel is a perfect venue for wedding portraiture with its large spaces and photogenic furnishings. For these portraits, I positioned the bride in front of a curtain and asked her to turn her body away from the light and face into the light. That way I obtained a play of shadows and light that gives the body and photo shape and dimension.
To obtain this series of high key portraits, a wedding photographer has to master his camera to perfection. Because of the large quantity of light entering the lens, the digital sensor is tricked and underexposes the camera by 2 stops. As such, the photographer has to compensate and in fact overexpose by 2 stops to obtain the correct exposure.
Every artist's style is a matter of subjective opinion and I prefer darker imagery where the subject is the brightest part of the photograph. However, the trend today in wedding blogs and magazines is to publish the California look, the high key or the over exposed, dreamy one. Even though I am not crazy about it, I totally understand why the bride and groom like such imagery. After all, a wedding is a perfect dream and the images reflect that state of mind on such special day.
In terms of post processing I selected a technique that matched the joy of this beautiful One King West wedding. More specifically, I increased the tones of orange and pink, raised the exposure to make the window disappear and applied selective skin softening and sharpening as well as dodging and burning.
All images on this album spread were captured with my beloved Canon 5D Mark III and the magnificent Canon 85mm f1.2 lens, a perfect portraiture lens in my opinion.
Location: 1 King St W, Toronto, ON M5H 1A1.
