The wedding bouquet is a beautiful yet utilitarian part of the wedding entourage. It is a useful prop that gets abused more than it probably should. The bouquet gets handed off innumerable times during a wedding and finally gets thrown into a crowd for one of the bridesmaids to try and snag.
Portrait Set-up
Despite all that abuse, I think the wedding bouquet is one of the most beautiful aspects of the wedding day. To properly capture its glory, I came up with the idea of taking a high key portrait of it to preserve its beauty before it gets tossed around too much. A high key portrait means that the light is set to overexpose the scene. The idea is to get the background to blow out or clip. For best results, a white background should be chosen for this type of portraiture. In human portraiture, a white scrim or backdrop cloth can be used but on location at a wedding, a white linen tablecloth or other translucent white fabric will work perfectly. The sun or other bright light light source like a flash or strobe should be set behind the bouquet to back light the flowers. Take a series of exposures starting at an even exposure and then progressively increase the exposure until the detail in the flowers start to white out or blow out. The last step is assembling the final product in Photoshop. Some layer blending is required to balance background and the detail in the flowers. The final product should look something like this:
Since we are under a stay-at-home order due to COVID-19, I had to improvise my set up a little for this shot. I made my own wedding bouquet from flowers I purchased at the grocery store and a ribbon we had lying around the house (don’t make fun of my lack of floral arranging skills too much). I used a white sheet as my backdrop, and I posed the bouquet on a table in from of my glass screen door. The sun is a great diffuse light source as it comes in through the sheet.
