We're taking a week off from the blog posts....busy bees working hard on our clients pictures and albums. :-) Daily Photo will resume soon as well as lots of updates about the great weddings and engagements we've been doing.
Ciao,
Sarah & Giorgio
WEDDING SERVICES - VENUE - PHOTOGRAPHY - ELOPEMENTS - ALBUMS
We're taking a week off from the blog posts....busy bees working hard on our clients pictures and albums. :-) Daily Photo will resume soon as well as lots of updates about the great weddings and engagements we've been doing.
Ciao,
Sarah & Giorgio
Some couples have personalized labels made for the wine bottles placed on the tables. In this case, the bride was lucky enough to find wine with her family name already on the label. I suppose that might be easier to do if your heritage is Italian or French, but having your names on the wine bottle can be a nice touch, whether you have personalized labels or happen to have a distant relative somewhere who owns a vineyard.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Alicia takes one last check in the mirror before heading out to meet her groom.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
As a commercial airline pilot, groom Nick is quite accustomed to spending time up in the clouds. The couple make California their home, but the bride's roots are in Chicago, specifically, the Little Italy neighborhood. They found the perfect spot to combine the bride's Italian heritage and Nick's affinity for breathtaking heights by having a rooftop wedding at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame on Taylor Street. The groom's English family wedding traditions were also present, including the lucky horseshoe. Congratulations to Catherine and Nick, and of course we wish them buona fortuna!
© Wedding Creativo Photography / Giorgio Ventola Inc.
The bride and groom, Jenny and Graham, take a stroll through the columns after their ceremony at the South Shore Cultural Center.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
The South Shore Cultural Center is a grand Chicago Park District venue with an important role in Chicago history. My own father used to be a caddy at the golf course in the 1950s, and Michelle and President Obama held their wedding reception here in 1992.
Becca and Jeff had a beautiful outdoor wedding over the weekend at Cantigny Park, a 500-acre park in Wheaton. It was orignally developed as an experimental family farm in the early 1930s by Colonel Robert R. McCormick (it remains part of the McCormic Foundation) before becoming a world-class botanical garden park in the late 1960s. It was indeed a wonderful place and a perfect day for an outdoor wedding for this happy couple.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
When Italian-American bride Catherine wed her groom Nick, she borrowed a tradition from his English family and carried a lucky horseshoe down the isle. Take note that the horseshoe is carried with the ends facing up to be sure the luck never runs out of their marriage!
While Americans share many wedding traditions with the British, there are some things, like the horseshoe, that have yet to generally catch on in the states, and there are plenty more great ideas to borrow from wedding customs in Great Britain.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Sometimes we find amazing light opportunities when we least expect it, like the reflections we caught in this tunnel-like hallway at Christina and Clay's wedding. It was fun featuring the "light" theme over the last week on our blog. We'll have to try something like that again, or revisit this topic another time.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Sometimes we like to use techniques that help make it appear the bride and groom are in a "dream" or are "alone in their own world" even though they are surrounded by family and guests at their reception. There are a couple of things going on here where we manipulate the light, focus, and depth-of-field with the shutter speed and flash.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Congratulations to Becca and Jeff who are getting married today! We had fun going around their Logan Square neighborhood for their engagement session.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Everyone knows that, like Rainmain, we like shiny sparkly things. So of course we always love sparklers! We've given many "on-the-spot" lessons to guests asking us how to catch this moment. It's fun to inspire folks move off "auto" on their point and shoot and experiment with the actual settings on their camera.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Backlighting can be a wonderful thing. It can happen naturally with the sun, artificially with professional lighting, and sometimes with just a little luck and good timing. This week we're talking the language of light, so stay tuned for more posts about light through Sunday.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
As we continue to feature the "language of light" this week, we for sure want to bring up Chiaroscuro. It is an Italian word originating in Renaissance art. It literally means "light-dark," and in art and photography technical terms it refers to contrasts between light and shadow to achieve a great depth or three-dimensional look in an image. We used to have a cat named Chiaroscuro, and one of our favorite painters is Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, so you can get an idea of how fascinated we are with looking for interesting balance and contrast of light and shadow.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
No one knows how to set a mood better than musicians. And it is not just the songs they play, but also their performance on stage and interactions with guests. The best event bands know how to deliver the whole package as performers, and that includes a well-lit stage. The Ken Arlen Orchestra does a great job at setting the perfect tone....pun intended.....with great music, lighting and showmanship. We had a lot of fun photographing the moody lighting on them at Kerrie and Bill's reception.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
Giorgio always says with photography we speak the language of light. We are always looking at both natural and artificial lighting in whatever circumstance we are in, and how to best use what is available, or what we can manipulate. In the studio, lighting is 100% controlled, but with weddings, while part of what we do is controlled, what we find most exciting is to improvise with the constantly changing lighting conditions throughout the day. We love when weddings have special lighting, and if you can manage to include it into your reception plans, it is well worth it. But Giorgio and I always have some tricks up our sleeves since many people also go with lighting "as is" at their venues.
All this week for our Daily Photo I will try to feature some of our favorite shots where you can see some special interplay with lighting or lights.
© Wedding Creativo Photography
You know what our favorite thing to see all of our brides put on when they are getting ready?
Confidence.
© Wedding Creativo Photography