amie morgan wedding photography of carmel ca | professional two-person photojournalist team specializing in destination weddings in the beautiful central california coast | serving monterey, carmel, pebble beach, pacific grove, santa cruz, and big sur | monterey wedding photographers shooting and capturing all your priceless memories
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Advice and tips for breathtaking wedding pictures
Wedding Photography Tips for Brides
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Q: When is the best time of day for photographs?
A: In general, the best lighting arrives during sunrise and sunset hours. However, given our location on the West Coast and the accompanying mountain ranges to our East, we've found sunset to be the best and most predictable.
This "window" of magical light exists for roughly 30-minutes before and after sunrise/sunset. With that said, if you could plan your event and/or the pre-wedding photographs around that sparkling time of day, you won't regret it.
Q: Conversely, when is the worst time of day for photographs?
A: Hands down, the worst time to shoot is in the heat of summer when the sun beats down its hardest from around noon thru 4pm or so. This piercing sun casts truly unnatural shadows on the face which consequently results in an exceptionally challenging photographic environment.
This is not to say that shooting during this time is impossible; however, what inevitably occurs with any photographer is that instead of focusing on the bride or groom's precious emotions precious seconds are spent white balancing, metering, and re-metering in order to compensate for the piercing light.
Q: Well, when does the sun actually rise and fall?
A: Sunlight is an amazing phenomena and constantly fluxuates throught the year in harmony with the seasons. As a professional wedding photographer it is essential to know how the sun's cycle will impact your upcoming ceremony, reception, and associated festivities which we're striving to photograph.
Before laying out the specific sunset schedule for the next year or so, assuming you're still in the pre-planning stage that is, it is good to remember that December 8th typically yields the the earliest sunset (the winter solstice which is has the fewest minutes of sunlight lands on December 21st). Conversely, the latest sunset takes place around June 28th (the summer solstice which is the "longest" day in the year, occurs on June 21st).
Although not 100% accurate, the following table should provide a good reference for sunrise and sunset times here on the Central California Coast:
> SUNSET (2008)
September 1st - 7:35pm
October 1st - 6:50pm
November 1st - 6:10pm
December 1st - 4:52pm
> SUNSET (2009)
January 1st - 5:03pm
February 1st - 5:34pm
March 1st - 6:02pm
April 1st - 7:30pm
May 1st - 7:56pm
June 1st - 8:21pm
July 1st - 8:30pm
August 1st - 8:13pm
September 1st - 7:35pm
October 1st - 6:51pm
November 1st - 5:10pm
December 1st - 4:52pm
Q: If you, as a professional photographer, could create the "ideal" wedding itinerary, what would it look like?
A: To begin, I would highly suggest you read our comments regarding a day-before bridal shoot; in short, we cannot emphasize enough that a pre-event bridal shoot is one of the easiest low-stress ways to ensuring natural, radiant, stunning photographs of the bride.
...more coming soon