Ceremony Magazine’s LA Bridal Fashion Shoot

We had a great time at the Four Seasons Hotel Westlake Village working on Ceremony Magazine’s bridal fashion spread for this year’s LA edition. Our models Kim Daniels, Kristin Keating and Casey Wilson were awesome, as always. You can read the magazine online and see the images published here: http://www.ceremonymagazine.com/flipbooks/2012/la/  Our bridal spread is towards the front.  We’re very excited to announce that Kim, Kristin and Casey will be among our models for this year’s “Recharge at Rancho” workshop on Memorial Day at beautiful Rancho Las Lomas. This year we’ll have two bridal couples in designer gowns and tuxes and a third couple in casual clothing for “engagement session” images. 

Back to the Four Season’s shoot… It was a very hot, sunny day, and all the models were great at enduring the heat, the hair and makeup tweaks and the frequent wardrobe changes. We were very lucky that our friend, photographer Henry Ventura was able to come down from Santa Barbara to lend an assisting hand. With all the different locations, gear to set up and move and the fast pace, we couldn’t have done it without him.  Some the images below show the set ups and the behind the scenes stuff.

This is one of Mirta’s images.  She has a knack for capturing fun spontaneous moments.  Here Kristin looks like she’s on her way to an English royal wedding.  Cheerio!

For the most part, when working outside under bright sun, we backlit our subjects and filled them in with white reflectors.  Long lenses and wide apertures helped separate our subjects from the background. In the image above, Kim was standing right in the path of one of the resident ant colonies, what a trooper! Manning (figuratively speaking) the reflector, with her back to the camera, is Amy Harrick, Ceremony’s Publisher and editor-in-Chief and Henry is holding two translucent panels to help keep detail on the gown.

This is pretty much the same set-up. This was shot with a 105 macro. All the jewelry on the models is real, at one point Kim was wearing over 1.5 million in diamonds. The gentleman in the back, nervously scratching his head, is with Lugano Diamonds. He was always very close by to keep all of us honest. 🙂

Here we used a gold reflector on the ground to minimize the green cast from the grass and a DC Profoto unit with a beauty dish to add a little pop.

Mirta’s always very good at catching little details that could be a problem in post. I think Casey is about 6’3″ or something in that area.

This is one of the last images, it was night by then, mostly available tungsten light. I bounced the on-camera flash with an amber filter turned way down off the white reflector for a little extra pop. I think this is the 35mm 1.4 on a D3s, pretty high ISO…

The Harley was just there, I’m ashamed to say we didn’t look for the owner to ask permission, I was losing light fast… Casey was on and off pretty fast.  The Austin Martin was offered by a dealer who had three of them on display outside the hotel. I wish we could have had more time with the bike and the cars… This was a fun shoot, and we loved hanging with our friends from Ceremony, our great models and our friend Henry. It was a long challenging day, but totally worth the effort!  Thanks Ceremony, the images look great in the magazine! We’re looking forward to next year…