I did this session back in January with my friend Kim. She was getting married in a few weeks so I asked if I could take some portraits of her before the wedding. Well, just the other day I was going back through older sessions finding photos to put together into a guide for new wedding clients and I came across her session and found one photo that I hadn't noticed before that I really loved, so I re-edited it for the guide. I haven't been able to get my mind off of it since, so I decided to re-edit a collection of the images.

I shot these photos in mine and Nate's old house we rented back in Fort Worth, TX. The house had these dark brown knotty pine walls and this room still had the original windows from when the place was built in the 40s. We cleared the furniture (in fact I was standing on our bed for a lot of these shots) and utilized the natural light to silhouette Kim's dress.

All of these are underexposed by at least one stop, some of them even more. I love the subtlety in the highlights and the softness about them. I edited these intuitively and obscured a lot of the details in the shadows to produce a more abstract quality. I like how as a collection these photos sort of get darker as you scroll down.

At one point in the session I gave her a bunch of flowers and told her to toss them in the air. It took about a thousand tries until I got a few where she's smiling, looking at the camera, and there wasn't motion blur in her arms. Then I got one miraculous shot where the flowers perfectly framed her face with just the right amount of depth. By the end the flowers littered the room and most of the petals had separated from the stems. I guess I forgot, or maybe I liked them there, because in these last two shots I was clearly too lazy to pick them up. I kind of like the texture and subtle shadow they add though.

These photos make me kind of giddy. I'm thankful for friends who help me make art.

Also can we talk about how insanely gorgeous her dress is??