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Last month I helped my friend Stella on the pre-wedding shots for her cousin. The venue was Kota Tua Jakarta in the afternoon. Initially Stella asked me coming to the morning photo session at Jakarta Cathedral, but it was hard to wake up so I skipped the morning session.

Actually this was my first experience of taking pre-wedding shots and I had no idea about the couple and the poses I’d like to take. I just met them on the site. I helped Stella because I wanted to learn pre-wedding shots and tried to figure out the poses on the spot. Luckily Yudieth helped me a lot as the secondary photographer.

It was a fun and hard job. Fun because I like taking picture of people/portraiture. Hard because the man is not a photogenic but the woman is really a banci foto so it was not easy to direct them. Not to mention that I was unprepared.

So, the lessons I learned from my first pre-wedding photo session were:

• Understand your subjects; know their passion, habits, things they like, their memories, etc. It will inspire you.
• Understand the venue; know where to take shots, at what time, and with what background. You can google the venues and see some sample shots. Get inspired!
• Engage your subject; bring them into conversation, make them relax, give them props. The best poses are mostly spontaneous poses, not arranged poses.
• Lighting, lighting, lighting; I forgot to bring flash gun and I learned later that many of my shots were poorly lit.
• Use Prime Lenses; Zoom Lenses typically can not produce images as sharp as Prime Lenses and their bokeh are inferior to Prime Lenses. Pre-Wedding is a series of planned and arranged shots, so don’t worry about moving backward or forward your body if you’re using Prime Lenses. You will want fine bokeh for Pre-Wedding shots.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes because you can always retake the pictures in Pre-Wedding session. Think about wedding photography, you can not retake the Marriage Oath or Prayer right?
• Be prepared!

I used Canon EF 24mm lens and Yudieth used Canon EF 50mm lens. These are two pictures taken by Yudieth with her 50mm lens:

And other B/W pictures I took (ooh..I love B/W!) – these two photos are actually off-session photos:

Oh, at the end of the session, I asked Stella to take our picture like this:

Hehehe…another lesson: it would be easier if your subjects are photogenic and know how to pose in front of the camera

Fun fact: Johana called Yudieth as “Kakak” or “Big Sister” in English. The fact is…Yudieth is much younger than her. Yudieth speculated that it was because of me, who looked like Om Om (Mature Man) at that time, going out with young girl like herself.

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