… JUST the bride’s bouquet. That one piece of the wedding day holds a LOT of power. When I’m shooting a wedding, what is the most CONSISTENT element that ends up being in most of the portraits? The bridal bouquet. It’s everywhere! I take details shots of it, I take bridal portraits with it and I encourage the bride to have it in most of her romantic portraits as well! I do this because when a bridal bouquet is done WELL, it can tie the WHOLE wedding theme together. I use bouquet shots to fill in album spreads, shoot the rings on, create the “blog” header for the wedding post and much more. It’s a very important piece of the wedding decor and yet some brides say “Well I’ll just skimp on the flowers because I spent a lot on photography”.  The ironic thing is that their bouquet is the MOST PHOTOGRAPHED detail of the whole wedding! So what do we do with this? You can’t approach a wedding budget and think “Well I’m investing a lot in photography so everything needs to be amazing in order to have amazing pictures.”… That’s NOT true at ALL. But when it comes to JUST the bridal bouquet, I encourage brides to invest in what they REALLY want because it will show up in their images more than anything else! I would rather the bride skimp on the boutonniere’s, the bridesmaid’s bouquet’s, their shoes and even their centerpieces before skimping on the bridal bouquet. So if you’re on a budget, here’s an example of how a bouquet a make quite an impact!

Mandy and Josh, like most young couples, were on a tight budget for their wedding.  Mandy, being the detail queen that she is, really REALLY wanted beautiful detail shots but knew that she couldn’t have extravagant florals all over her reception. So I encouraged her to have simple centerpieces but to REALLY go all out for her bouquet because it would be PROMINENT in her wedding pictures! She took my advice and I’m SO glad she did because I had a ball photographing the beautiful details of her bouquet!! Take a look at how much her bouquet showed up in their images!