by Scott Sady

I’d like to introduce you to one of our newish offerings, the often misunderstood trash the dress photo shoot. This is an add-on to our wedding packages or could be included in the cost of our higher end package. Most brides will never step foot in their dress again after their wedding day, a day in which they often look and feel as beautiful as they will anytime in their lives. During a regular wedding photo shoot, we as photographers do a wide-range of things from documenting the moments and telling the story of your day, capturing the details and little still-life shots of your setting and organize a portrait session, all under a strict time limit.

Imagine what you could do if you take away that time limit and say “We are going to get dressed up for the sole purpose of taking the best pictures we possibly can.” I would love to have every couple to myself for two hours at sunset on each wedding I shoot, but that is impractical. Enter the trash the dress photo session. Usually done in next few days after the wedding, we get dressed up, talk about some ideas, bring some fancy lights out and do what for all intensive purposes is a fashion shoot in your gown and tux. It can be a lot of fun, but I may ask you to do whatever looks best for the photo, even if that means wading out into the lake. We were originally going to do an underwater shoot for this one,  but the clouds cut down the visibility underwater. In exchange, they gave us a heck of a light show.

These are not models. I want to be clear on that because a lot of wedding photographers starting out go to workshops and seminars where the lighting and the models are provided for them. This is an actual couple, shot at my favorite south lake tahoe beach. You can see their engagement shoot from January here. I hope to have their full wedding, which we shot the day prior to this, posted in the next few weeks. In the meantime, have a look, enjoy and consider booking one of these super-fun photo sessions as part of your wedding.