In the morning, there are two "inanimate" shots I’m always chasing: the dress and the rings.


And that leads to a practical question: how do you keep those shots fresh after hundreds of weddings?


Well, there's a trick I picked up from the first photographer I worked with, and here's two stories:


  1. He looks around the room, and what catches his eye is a red high-backed chair. One of his aesthetic principles was to reduce the number of colours in a photograph, so this shot was right up his alley: a beige room, where everything points to the splash of colour and the dress suspended from it.
  2. We're on an island in Fiji, and the photographer wants a particular shot. It took us an hour to pull off, but we drive to the big "Welcome to Mana Island" sign at the wharf, and then he climbs onto the buggy's roof to hang the dress from the arch.


So, how do you keep things fresh? Well, the fact is that you can't, not really. After 20, 30 weddings, inevitably you're going to repeat ideas -- let alone after hundreds of weddings.


But what you can try is personalise each shot -- just a little.


And if you can imbue the dress shot with something specific to a time and a place, then it's no longer just "a dress shot" -- it becomes a moment from this wedding.