Brainerd Lakes On Location Bridal Services

We, Tracy Watson and Jenn Marie, from the team of Captivating-Beauty had the privilege of working with this beautiful bride and her bridal party.

Shelly Paulson did an amazing job capturing beautiful memories for this couple. Take a peek below and see for yourself. Great work

When it comes to outdoor weddings, I always say that sunshine and heat are better than rain. Well, it definitely didn’t rain on Chris and Jill’s wedding day. The sun was an honored guest for their lakeside wedding and reception on the beach at Madden’s on Gull Lake Resort in Brainerd.

This first image sums them up as a couple. They adore each other and are adored by their friends and family. It was so fun to be a part of their day and share in the love!

Photographer’s Notes: Photographing weddings means being ready for any type of lighting challenge, this includes full sun on a white dress and human skin. What I have found to be the best approach is to shoot RAW (which I always do) and underexpose the image. I always photograph weddings with the highlight alert on in for the back of the camera. As a general rule, I don’t let the dress “blink” or overexpose (though once in awhile, I’ll let it blink maybe 10-15%). Once you lose detail in the highlights of an image, there is only a little leeway to recover that detail. I know that especially in a situation like full sun where I am using very low ISO settings on my camera (usually ISO 100), I will have a lot of leeway in bringing back the shadow detail. The image may look dark on the back of the camera, but you have to trust that you are getting the most data to work with in your RAW file by underexposing.

On a side note to that, brides spend a lot of time, money and energy choosing just the right gown, and that includes the small details and texture in the fabric and detailing. I see many photographers overexposing the gown so much that all the lovely detail is pretty much gone. Keeping your highlight alert on and not letting the dress blink will fix this problem! Even if you like a more bright, washed out style of editing, not blowing out the dress highlights in camera will give you more dress detail once you get your exposure back to where you like it in post-production.

Okay, on to the wedding photos