Wicked in Red!

I’d been asked the question by a friend sometime last year what I thought of colored wedding dresses.  My reply was something like “whatever floats your boat….as long as it’s pretty and not trashy, tacky, or otherwise horrideous!”

I had been skeeming in my mind of a shoot for a pretty Winter day, and  was trying to find a model with a wedding dress.  I called my friend Matti and her reply wasn’t what I wanted initially, but then she said the words that would change my game! “I have a red dress!  It has a train!”  Thank goodness!  We then made a plan to head to her family’s land over here in Riceville.  It was A LOT later than I had wanted to get started, but God showed there was a perfectly good reason just why it had taken so long for us to get ready to shoot…THE LIGHT!  It was PERFECT!

If you’ve even toyed with photography at all, especially the whole “natural light” concept and the sheer beauty it adds to any image, then you’ve undoubtedly heard of “the magic hour”!  Now, I believe that term is a bit amiss as it’s not just a single hour but a time of day!  The time of day when the sun starts it’s rising, or my personal favorite, it’s setting process is when I can get completely LOST in my shoots during this “magical” time of day!  The images just. get. better. the lower the sun sinks, and this day was no exception!

There’s was SO much beauty surrounding us up on that hill, and lots of dogs too LOL, that I think the “quick” shoot I’d envisioned turned in to something just short of 2 hours….and that was alright by me!

Now, the story behind the bouquet….I hate red roses….hate, and I REALLY HATE Leatherleaf…that UGLY, and rather trite, fern filler leaf sooo many florists seem to want to RUIN perfectly good bouquets with!  It was 2 days after Valentine’s day for this shoot, another good time of year to bring out the Red “Wedding” Dress, and the day after V-Day I went to a local supermarket to see what lovely 50% off steal they had for candy!  Well to my surprise there were TONS of dozens of roses still left and….marked 50% off!  This made me extremely ecstatic!

I pinched around on a few of the prettiest ones and found some that actually felt like, and looked like, they still had a week or so on them.  So, one dozen antique or vintage blush pink and one dozen ivory roses later I left….no candy in tow! I’ve always LOVED Nandina bushes!  Their GORGEOUS red berries in the Winter make excellent photo props when it snows, but their leaves have always looked fantastic in the handmade “yard” bouquets I’d gather up from Mom’s flowers!  So, I wanted an alternative option to the traditional “Red rose Wedding Bouquet” everyone seems to use around this time of year.  I rounded up my sheers, headed outside to the Nandina bushes, collected my floral tape, and some ribbon and went to arranging.  What was born from a 30 minute arranging session was nothing short of one of my all time FAVORITE bouquets I’ve ever created!

So, Please enjoy it and Matti’s dress, share it, and know that there are GORGEOUS alternatives to “White Dress, Red Rose weddings”…all you have to do is get “outside the box and in to life!”

Credits:

Model: Matti Shamblin

Photography: BraskaJennea Weddings

Hair: BraskaJennea Weddings

Makeup: Matti Shamblin

Floral Arrangement: BraskaJennea Weddings