Many times, the best photos are taken at San Francisco city hall between poses. You can catch a moment like this one above. A San Francisco city hall bride thought her train was not looking the way she wanted, so she was trying to move it when I captured this image. Candid photography can often be the most complimentary to the subject. This is certainly true when it comes to San Francisco city hall wedding photography. Yes, the image was candid, but we made sure the bride was in the perfect light before we even began taking her portraits. We like having the bride's veil facing the light source, which in this case was 3rd Floor window. As you can see from the photo above, the light makes her veil and train glow as it reflects back to the camera.
Some pictures are accidental, but it is important to always place your subject in a great situation and background. This building has many of these amazing backgrounds because of the unique SF City Hall architecture. We took a series of more posed photos of this same bride in this location that all turned out amazing. If anything, my style is defined by making sure my subjects are in the best light and with a great background behind them. Once that is accomplished, any photo we take will look amazing. It doesn't matter whether it was on purpose or accidental. This candid image would be the perfect compliment to the couple's wedding album.
It is great to be back at San Francisco city hall after it being closed for over a year. For so many years, we found ourselves at city hall weekly shooting weddings and doing what we love. The Pandemic definitely was a shock and it took some time to understand what was happening. When Covid-19 first hit, we all thought the 3 week lock down would it. We were certainly wrong about that with it lasting for more than a year at San Francisco city hall!
Hard to believe that we would not be making our many trips to San Francisco and meeting great couples during such a very important day in their lives. I don't think we took it for granted, but it sure was eye opening to see everything taken away from our brides and grooms all at once. Corona Virus has caused much worse and more important devastation and we do not want to minimize that in any way. It seems that all of us have been affected in different ways. We are so happy to be back and photographing weddings again and maybe will shoot yours next! The wedding pictured here was one of the last ones we photographed before San Francisco city hall closing. As mentioned, we had no idea at the time that this was our last City Hall wedding for 14 months!
