One of the favorite things we enjoy about being SF city hall wedding photographers is the beautiful light available around various parts of the building. Unlike newer buildings, city hall has many large windows that often go from the ceiling nearly down to the floor. At different times during the day the light either comes straight in and bathes our wedding couples in direct light or indirectly like what you see in the photo above. For this particular photo, we placed the bride just close enough to the window to actually have it in the photo, but not too far away either. We wanted the beautiful indirect light to give our beautiful bride a nice soft natural look. The only issue with the particular photo is that there is a radiator just below it and it doesn't add anything positive to the photo. So in this case, I removed it in Photoshop. I don't do this kind of thing often, but it worked well here.
Wedding photography at city hall is so amazing because the light sources such as this window are so beautiful that they can become part of the image. Once the fall season is here, the light becomes more direct coming through some of the windows and present even more options for amazing photography. The sun will make small little spot lights in various parts of the building depending upon the time of day or season of the year. We like to put our city hall brides in these spotlights to highlight various parts of their wedding dress or veil. No doubt that the more formal wedding dresses do best with this type of lighting treatment. This is because the veil and other lacey material does a really nice job of reflecting the light and even sometimes glowing. You can see this in the photo below by looking at her beautiful wedding dress and the way the veil lights up with the window in the background.
For the photo displayed directly below we asked our couple to do some dance moves. This type of dynamic posing can be far superior to a more static type of City Hall photo. It always adds drama to an image if you can show the newlyweds moving in some way. Sometimes we have them walk hand in hand and other times we try something like this photo below where we just have them enjoy each other. We also offer inexpensive weekend wedding photography in the San Francisco Bay Area. To learn more about our traditional weekend wedding coverage click the link. To check out our discount wedding photography packages please click.
