My brother got married in late April and a few weeks before this they asked me to do a pre-wedding shoot with them as is common practice these days with most couples wanting to get married. It’s something that alleviates the stress of having to do an actual shoot during or after the wedding itself when there are already too many things happening to begin with.

This was taken as a HDR photo and I’m quite glad that I think it doesn’t look too obvious that it is a HDR. The sun was pelting down hard on that day and so it was always going to cast very strong shadows in the shades and over-expose everything else. We had planned a long day of shooting so rather than opt to carry bulky reflectors, I thought this was going to be a good way around the exposure problem.

Of course, when you apply one solution, a different set of problems arise. It made for an easy shooting method, but post-processing definitely was no picnic. Balloons don’t like to remain still when faced with a breezy day at Williamstown and HDR doesn’t particularly work easily when you have too much difference from frame to frame. In the end I’ve had to resort to manually bringing up each layer rather than using an automated program.

All up, the entire day was about 8 hours worth of shooting, 4 wardrobe changes, many kilometres of driving (and walking around the city) and lots of balloons released into the the sky. By the end of it we were well and truly knackered but we got what we wanted!