San Francisco Bride

One of my favorite things to photograph is a beautiful woman in her wedding dress. So often on wedding days there is a lot of chaos. There is often not a lot of time to take beautiful bridal portraits, yet brides spend thousands on their dress. I've photographed many weddings and time again and again I see bridal portraits as something that is often cut from the list of photos on the day of the wedding because there simply isn't time. This mostly happens because hair and makeup always takes longer than what the bride and bridal party allowed for and unfortunately that is often the time that is used for bridal portraits.

I love taking brides on photoshoots AFTER their wedding day. We often travel to a beautiful location and the bride gets to enjoy her wedding dress without worrying about it getting too dirty at the wedding. Brides are often more carefree and have more fun with this type of shoot. On their wedding day they have so many other things to worry about, but at these photoshoots they can just feel beautiful, glamorous, and can still celebrate being a bride.

If you photograph weddings, try recommending to your brides having a photoshoot in their gown a couple weeks after their wedding. They will end up with photos that they will not only love, but ones that their family will cherish for generations.

If you are a future bride or you have a friend getting ready to get married, I highly recommend doing a bridal shoot after the wedding.

For this photoshoot, this bride and I drove around to 3 different locations in San Francisco at sunrise.

When planning one of these photoshoots, take time to consider the lighting, weather, and even if the places you want to go have lots of tourists.

For this particular photoshoot we opted for sunrise instead of sunset to avoid lots of crowds. The one thing we didn't take into consideration was that we chose a weekend of a major marathon in the city. There were tens of thousands of people flocking into the city early to start the race. We didn't have tourists at our locations but it took 3 hours to get out of the city alone.

Bridal shoots are a great way for brides to really get the most use out of their beautiful dress and an amazing opportunity to have photographs that they will cherish forever.