wedding photography

Vintage Wedding Photo

All brides have something old and something new on their wedding day, but more and more, we’ve seen a trend toward more fully incorporating retro and vintage-inspired elements into our NJ wedding couples’ celebrations. Whether it’s Gatsby glamour or 50s finery, brides are putting a touch of classic elegance back into their unique NJ weddings and receptions.

Whether you want a top to bottom vintage theme or just want to bring a bit of yesterday’s style into a modern wedding, here are a few tips we’ve noticed might be helpful to get you started. Read more…

Wedding Photos

After your wedding, you’ll want to share both the gorgeous collection of photos taken by your wedding photographer during your Big Day, and the photos you took at your pre-wedding parties, your after-party, the morning-after breakfast and all of the moments in between. Your guests will be eager to see your wedding portraits, and guests too will want to share the photos they took.

With so many photos to share, you’ll find there are two different sharing plans to establish. The first is the traditional photo-sharing method enacted by your professional wedding photographer. He or she will create an online gallery of all of your photos, categorized into pre-wedding, ceremony, reception and portraits, and post it with an access code so that only you and your guests can view the photos from your event.
Read more…

Perfect wedding photo

Add a sense of place to your wedding photography, capturing the beautiful wedding gardens, the stately mansion architecture, grand staircases and all of the other images that led you to book your New Jersey wedding location. You’ll want to remember your wedding garden in bloom, the flower petals sprinkled on the path leading to your ceremony, the beauty of your reception ballroom, the fireplaces and other details of your wedding site.

Many of our top New Jersey wedding photographers say that couples are asking for more ‘setting shots,’ wanting to capture the gorgeous locations of their ceremonies and receptions. They add these photos to their wedding albums, and they even frame beautiful architectural or floral images for display in their home, with this custom artwork reminding them every day of the beautiful wedding they enjoyed. Read more…

Bridal Party Photos

Many of our New Jersey wedding couples choose to skip the stereotypical bridal party photos, such as the one of the entire bridal party jumping up in the air, and especially the photo in which the groomsmen hold the bride sideways. A top wedding trend is to add more originality to the bridal party group photos, and we have some suggestions for you, according to the top wedding photographers in our area: Read more…

Great Photos With Parents

Wedding photos with parents used to be traditional photos of the bride flanked in either side by her mother and father, with the groom in the same pose with his parents, and then the couple with each set of parents and then with all parents. If you like the classic parent poses, by all means keep them on your Must Get wedding photography wishlist, but consider some of these new options, suggested by the top NJ wedding photographers, to get more natural-looking photos that you’ll be more likely to frame and display:

• The bride kissing her mom or dad on the cheek
• The bride’s dad taking her hand to help her up a stair
• The groom taking his mom by the hand
• The bride and groom with both sets of parents, including step-parents in a stylized shot with some people sitting and some standing
• A photo from behind the wedding couple and their parents, as they look out over a scenic vista or their wedding gardens
• The wedding couple and their parents walking together on the wedding grounds
• A reflection shot from the wedding gardens pond or lake, showing the couple with their parents
• The wedding couple and their parents raising champagne glasses in a toast
• Everyone eating wedding cake together (or a cultural wedding food)
• The bride hugging her seated parents from behind as the groom smiles from the side (and the same shot with the groom hugging his parents, with the bride looking on, smiling) Read more…

It’s now one of the top wedding trends of 2012 to have the bride and groom see each other before the wedding ceremony so that they may take their wedding photos.

Taking Photos

If you choose this timing for your pre-wedding photos, there are several advantages:

• You look your very best, having just had your hair and makeup done, and everyone else looks their best as well…you’re not taking photos five hours after your wedding beauty services, so you look fresher and prettier, as does your wedding gown.
• Your pre-wedding photos will not be rushed. Set at least an hour and a half for this relaxed photo session, so that you can get wonderful couple portraits and group photos. Read more…

Black and White photos

A top wedding trend in wedding photography is getting  a number of your photos in black and white. According to TheWeddingReport.com, 60% of brides and grooms request black and white photos in their photography packages, since this style of photography provides an elegant, timeless effect for photo albums and framed portraits. Since Old Hollywood wedding trends are in right now, black and white photos capture this popular style.

Our top New Jersey photographers say that digital photography allows you to turn any wedding photo into black and white, as well as sepia and other effects, so it does not cost extra to have black and white photos created.

Here are the top ways that you can use black and white photos in your plans:

In albums and prints:

• Begin your wedding album with a page of black and white images, or a full-page portrait of yourselves. The rest of the album can contain color prints.
• Create an entirely black and white wedding album, a top wedding idea suggested by celebrity wedding planners
• Order a number of black and white portraits for a themed area of framed pictures in your home
• Order a large black and white portrait of your official couple wedding photo to hang in your home, to work with your home décor color scheme Read more…

Gown and Accessory Trends

Inspired by celebrity wedding trends, today’s brides wear not one wedding dress, but two or more, changing from a ceremony dress into a chic, stylish dress for the reception. At our wedding venue, we’ve seen brides wear cultural wedding dresses for the ceremony, then change into either a traditional wedding dress or shorter, sleeker dress for the reception.

Here are some additional 2^nd-Looks for your wedding reception, garden wedding, or cocktail party wedding:

• Go romantic and lacy with your first wedding dress, then change into a sparkly dress suitable for the nighttime reception lighting.
• Wear a sleek, fitted wedding dress for the ceremony, then change into a dress that’s easier to dance in for the reception.
• Wear a traditional white wedding dress for the ceremony, then change into a colorful dress for the reception.
• Wear a traditional wedding headpiece and veil for the ceremony, then remove it and change into a tiara or jeweled hairclips for the reception Read more…

We’re so happy to see the return of one-time-use wedding cameras set on our wedding reception room guest tables here at the Ram’s Head Inn in Galloway, New Jersey. For a time, they disappeared as brides and grooms sought to shave expenses from their wedding budget, but now wedding couples welcome them back into their tabletop design, offering their guests the fun of using them.

Here are the top reasons why wedding cameras are back:

• They’re prettier than ever. At www.Kodak.com, you’ll see pretty red floral, blue floral, and purple floral one-time-use cameras, in addition to traditional ‘bridal white’ cameras. And you’ll also see cameras in solid colors coordinating with the top wedding colors of the season: orange, yellow, blue, red, even black and white for themed weddings.

• They’re now made with top film quality. With 800-speed film, photos taken with these cameras can capture a priceless wedding moment in quality resolution.

• They keep kids occupied. Many of our New Jersey wedding couples say this is their top reason – that the one-time-use cameras on every table get the kids playing, happily occupied, laughing, taking photos on the dance floor, and –simply put – not prone to behavior problems they’d have if play wasn’t an element of your reception.

• They capture the moments you miss. While you’re out in the wedding gardens having your portraits taken, guests use these cameras to capture wonderful moments between relatives, such as great-grandma meeting a guest’s baby for the first time, or the bride’s parents showing off their skills on the dance floor.

• Guests are told they’ll get to see and perhaps buy the photos. When you place a printed note with each one-time-use wedding camera, you let guests know that the photos they take will be included on a photo-share website for them to view and purchase. Guests then tend to take greater care with the pictures they take, and it works out wonderfully for everyone.

• Extra wedding cameras let you capture the after-party. When all of the cameras are gathered up at the end of the reception, you can take the ones that still have shots left on them to your after-party to capture memorable moments with your friends long after your wedding photographer has left.

• Panoramic one-time-use cameras let you snap your own wide-angle photos of our beautiful wedding gardens and grounds, as well as all of your friends and family celebrating your special day.

All the best,

Caitlyn Bradley, Director of Private Dining, Ram’s Head Inn

Your wedding video is a priceless capturing of your dream wedding day, and you get to help create it. When you alert your wedding videographer to what you do and don’t want on your wedding day footage, you play a big part in the final version.

The top wedding videographers we know from our elite community of New Jersey wedding experts, including award-winning video experts from the entire Northern and Central  Jersey and New York City regions, among others, want to hear from you about the types of footage you love, and what you have no desire for. For instance, you might not want your wedding videography to include interviews of guests at their tables. Some guests are camera-shy and cringe when they see the videographer coming at them. You don’t want your guests to be uncomfortable, so you might add ‘no table interviews’ to the Don’t list you deliver to your videographer well before the wedding day.

Here are some of the top Don’ts that today’s brides and grooms have in mind when it comes to their wedding videography:

• Too many special effects. Couples say they find it distracting when their ceremony footage keeps transforming from black-and-white to color, so ask your wedding videographer to use special effects minimally.

• Too much focus on us. A great videographer knows to stick close to the bride and groom in order to capture those wonderful looks between them, interactions with close friends and with the flowergirls and other magical moments. But today’s wedding couples want lots of footage of their family and friends enjoying the celebration.

• No line dances. Some brides and grooms agree to having line dances at their receptions, sometimes on request from their parents, but they often don’t need that footage shot, nor included in their final wedding video.

• No table interviews. Again, guests who get surprised by a camera in front of them often don’t express themselves eloquently. It’s not something they want captured for posterity. And wedding couples wish to spare them the awkwardness.

• No picking out music for us. Brides and grooms prefer to submit a list of songs they’d like used as the soundtrack for their wedding video, not to be surprised when the videographer adds songs they don’t like…or that remind them of previous relationships!

• No baby photo montages. Some of our New Jersey wedding couples choose instead to display those adorable baby and childhood photos as an entertainment feature at the start of their wedding dinner, not including them on their wedding video.

A large portion of wedding videography cost is due to the time it takes for your video expert to edit your video, especially if you’ve purchased a video package providing you with just an hours’ worth of footage. So your Don’t requests may even save you money by eliminating some editing elements such as special effects. Cost aside, though, the goal is creating the wedding video you want, one you’ll watch again and again in the future.

Best,

Michael Mahle, Director of Communications, Pleasantdale Château