The importance of capturing the getting ready

During the first meetings with the future bride and groom, sometimes it happens that I am asked to start the photo shooting at the ceremony, skipping the getting-ready part of the event.

Always keeping in mind that my customers obviously make the final decision on the work I am going to do for them, I always highly recommend them to do not miss an important moment like getting ready.

The photos I take during the wedding preparations are usually the ones that couples can’t really wait to see because they reveal to each other what happened when everything had yet to start.

The preparations are a unique and magical moment where the spouses, in the intimacy of their homes and surrounded by a few friends and relatives, live the last moments of wait before the long dreamed wedding ceremony.

For the brides in particular, it really is a moment full of emotions that create a memory that will cherish forever: they usually get ready in the intimacy of their homes, helped by mothers and sisters; the final touches to make-up and hairstyles, the smiles and hugs with the best friends, the joy of wearing their gorgeous wedding dresses, and finally the deep emotion of their dads who see them walking out of their bedrooms dressed like princesses.

A few days ago I lived such a sweet moment at Anna’s house, a girl who has been my schoolmate and travel companion during a student international exchange program in Canada many years ago, before being my client today.

Anna, in the morning of her wedding, was with me at her parents’ house, in the small room that has been her bedroom for twenty years and that her mother has always kept intact, leaving all her posters, drawings and photos hanging on the closet shutters.

All her memories were still there and on that morning, on her colorful closet, her beautiful wedding dress was hanging too.

As a symbol of the new above the old, the image of young Anna overlapped on the sweetness of her today, on her wedding day.

I could really feel a special energy in that bedroom, where so many things were coexisting at the same time and in the same place.

During those few hours of getting ready many beautiful things has happened: while Anna relied on the hands of her make-up artist, her elder sister teased her by showing around some photos of her as a child “look at you!”.

Both laughed like little girls, the atmosphere became lighter.

Then their mother came in the room: she had just founded somewhere an Anna’s old toy, and Alisha, her granddaughter, immediately started to play with it.

When the moment arrived, the two women helped the bride wearing the wedding dress and their hands were trembling with emotion. The atmosphere suddenly became a little more solemn.

And finally her dad arrived, he slowly opened the door and looked at his daughter; he was moved and she was ready for the most important day of her life.

I asked myself how many times in life that father has opened that door and found his little girl running towards him happily, and what an immense joy he must have felt on that morning when he saw that child who had become a woman.

It amazed me to see how nothing has changed in that bedroom after all these years, especially the love of such a cheerful family.

And these are the things that I would be sorry to miss if I did not photograph the preparations before a wedding ceremony.

Unique moments that become memories that should be jealously kept forever, like a poster when you are a teenager.