As Colorado local photographers, we enjoy a beautiful masterpiece of mountains sitting in our backyard. Our parks, schools and homes look out onto them. Most of our brides, local or not, look for that gorgeous view at the venue they book. But our hundreds of brides all want one thing; originality. How can you take a gorgeous mountain, and stray away from cliche mountain backdrops? Let us put your mind at ease by breaking down the location experience in steps to make you feel carefree and excited about exploring. The question here is, how can you be different than the other 130 brides this Venue will have this year?
- PREVIEW THE VENUE: Seems like this would be a given, but we have destination brides from all over the world come to get married in front (or on) our beautiful Rockies. If you physically can’t get there, have a friend, family member, your photographer or videographer, go scout the location and send you some images. Keep in mind, scenery in Colorado is ever changing, and that gorgeous aspen tree in October will lack about 50,000 leaves in December! But this will give you a good idea of what you can expect. Never trust google to give you an accurate representation of what you’re getting.
2. WALK-THROUGH
While this sounds a lot like the preview, this doesn’t necessarily need to include you. Be adamant that if possible (sometimes it is not, depending on how remote the location is) your photographer does a walk-through and knows the area well. Why does it matter if your photographer knows the area? While whatever venue you chose is sure to be gorgeous, let’s be real, most photographers are lazy, and the timeline is crunched and no one is making time to go anywhere. Fatal error. You want to be different? Take a detour. Use the scenery you have around you. Let your photographer take you to explore, adventure, and have fun! (This is a great time to have some one-on-one time with your significant other too) Also the walk-through will give a good idea of sun timing. Example: In Positano, Italy the sun sets 1 hour before anywhere else along the coast because of the mountain that sits right behind the city. Colorado Springs is similar, the mountain range gives us an earlier sunset than somewhere like Denver, these things should be planned ahead of time, especially if you want sunset pictures.
3. YOUR PLANNER AND PHOTOGRAPHER SHOULD BOTH WORK ON THE TIMELINE
Why does this have anything to do with location? ^^ See above. The timing of your ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner, sunset session, first look, etc should all be planned around the timing of the light available. If you don’t mind that all of your pictures are taken in pitch black, than you’ll have no problems. But with Colorado’s impressive 350 days of Sunshine, we’re anticipating you’d like to see the sun a bit! It isn’t your planners job to check out sun cycles, but they are always happy to talk to the photographer/videographer and make minor adjustments if it means better photos.
4. TRUST YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER
See that closet? We love it. Let’s get in it. Yes, we’ve said this before and we adored the way it looked (See Chelsea and Ryan hamming it up below). See that rock, stand on it! Lets go shoot in front of these garbage cans… Ok, actually that is taking it too far. We won’t ever do that. But, we’ve had some wild ideas, and it typically ends up with one of us on a ladder, laying on the ground, or standing in a river. And let me say, we are here for it. Your photographer should take the time to be creative with you, after all, you spent hours on hair and makeup and you look ‘gorgeous baby!’ so be sure you get that time to feel like a model on the front of Rocky Mountain Bride- exactly where we expect this picture will be after we take it! When you hire a professional photographer, make sure their creative instincts match what your looking for, a simple portfolio check will show you this. And if you liked what you saw, trust what they say, they want you to look as incredible in the back of that camera as you feel.
5. YOUR PINTEREST BOARD- NOPE.
Let me say first, we all love Pinterest. But it isn’t that originality you crave. It has been done. Now it is a great way to help yourselves learn to pose! We encourage movement and fun, but let’s think of Pinterest as guidelines, instead of a must have. Instead of showing your photographer this picture you found, explain it and try to recreate it. 9/10 times it will end up 1000% better than what you saw online anyway. All photographers have a unique style, a creative eye, and they might see something different than how you see it. That’s the fun part! Remember, trust.
6. DON’T BE AFRAID TO SHOOT INSIDE
There, we said it. We love the sun and natural light, but inside lighting can be fun to play with and can be set up 1000’s of ways with some fancy photographer lights. Hotels with pretty lights, homes with big beautiful features or gorgeous bay windows, any stairs anywhere, concrete walls, brick walls, they might not look like much to your professional photographer its creativity waiting to be captured!
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