This image was taken by Dan Pepe of Dan Pepe Photography, out of Houston, TX.
He can be found on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.
Gear used: Canon 5DmarkIII, Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS
This image is one of my favorite shots even though it is a bit rudimentary. It is not uncommon for a bride and groom to walk out of their wedding ceremony, stop before all the guests gathered outside, and have a smooch. So in terms of preparation, I had time to get to the vantage point I wanted to shoot from, and I knew it was coming.
What wasn’t rudimentary, were a few key elements I think make this image stand out from others that I took that day, and I believe it also makes my portfolio stand out from other photographers.
One thing that I deserve no credit for, was that it was a military wedding. I think Military weddings have a special kind of drama. The juxtaposition of love and tenderness and the hard strength of a person who defends our country, almost always at great personal expense, has an unspoken tension – a good kind of tension, tension because there is love that might be taxed in the future by deployment or other struggles related to being in the military. What I DO deserve credit for, was setting myself up for success by lining up the shot right.
Because it was a military wedding, I was blessed with this uniformity that occurs in the image – literally uniforms in repeating pattern, but also the swords, which I wasn’t expecting. The two down in the front and the rest pointing up adds a nice frame for the couple to reside in, and it’s a triangular one, at that! Two big composition tools at work, triangles and framing. I also like that you can’t see too much detail in the faces of the other servicemen. Some are obstructed by arms, others are blurred by a shallow depth of field, but the key is that they aren’t attention grabbing, they don’t pull you away from the main subject, and that’s working well for this image, too. Even the faces you do see are fairly expressionless, which helps them to not jockey for attention.
Because the groom is wearing white, which is not terribly usual, he and the bride make up the one shape that is united against the dark background, and that makes them more of one visual object than two (a little wedding metaphor, for you).
But my favorite thing about this image is the tiniest of details, you may not have even noticed. Surely you did notice the stuff flying around in the air all around the couple. I love that it gives the impression of a fraction of a second in time. The quickness of wedding day is on display here, and it’s something every married couple lives through. But the part you might not have noticed is that the stuff suspended in the air is almost perfectly segregated, left side bubbles, right side bird seed. I think a bubble or two is creeping over and I didn’t need it to be perfect enough to bother photoshopping it out, but I just like that minuscule bit of imbalance in a moderately symmetrical image.
If I had to say the biggest lesson I learned while taking this shot, it would be the affirmation that preparation produces results. This was far from my first wedding, and I knew where I wanted to be when they exited the church – front and center. I knew there would be a kiss, but when the other magic happened that I wasn’t expecting myself, I was able to get a next-level image that no one else there got. The subject matter, the clutch timing, and the magic of putting myself in the right place at the right time are all reasons this image has been a favorite of mine for a long time.
