A Getting-Ready Room With No Room
The morning of a wedding usually happens in whatever room was available: a hotel room with a bed taking up most of the floor, a cottage bedroom at a farm venue, a small flat with good light and no space. It is one of the most photographed hours of the day and one of the most constrained, because a photographer cannot solve a small room by stepping backwards.
Why small rooms are hard
The obvious difficulty is distance. To fit a whole person in the frame you need a certain amount of space between camera and subject, and in a small room that space does not exist. The usual answer is a wider lens, but wide lenses come with a cost: anything close to the edge of the frame gets stretched. A hand, an arm or a face near the corner of a wide shot looks subtly wrong, and on a wedding morning that matters.
The less obvious difficulty is background. In a large room you can move sideways until the clutter is out of shot. In a small one there is nowhere to move to, so whatever is behind your subject is what you get. Half the work of photographing a tight room is not about the camera at all. It is about what is in it.
The third difficulty is light. A small room usually has one window, and that window is usually competing with a ceiling light and a lit bathroom doorway. Different lights, different colours, one small space.
The three things worth clearing
If you do nothing else on the morning, do these. They take a few minutes between everyone and they change every photograph taken in that room.
- Clear one wall and the floor in front of the window. Not the whole room, just a working corner near the light. Suitcases, shopping bags, shoes, hangers, coffee cups, the hairdryer, the packaging from everything. Push it all to the far side or into the bathroom and close the door.
- Make the bed and take everything off it. A made bed is a clean background and a place to lay out a dress. An unmade bed covered in bags is the single most common thing that ruins otherwise lovely frames.
- Move the hair and makeup station to the window. Most artists arrive expecting to set up wherever there is a plug and a mirror, which is often the darkest corner. Ask early, and ask nicely, because it also happens to be better light for them to work in.
Where a photographer stands in a small room
Mostly in the doorway, in the corners, and low. Corners buy the longest available diagonal across a room, which is more distance than any wall offers. Doorways add the depth of the next room and give a natural frame around the subject. Getting low and shooting slightly upward removes floor clutter from the picture and makes a low-ceilinged room feel taller than it is.
Mirrors do a great deal of work in tight spaces, because a mirror is effectively a second room. A reflection gives you a face while the camera is behind a shoulder, and it lets a photographer be present without being in the way. Wardrobe mirrors, bathroom mirrors and the mirror the makeup artist brought are all worth using.
And a small room means shooting closer and tighter. Hands fastening a button, an earring going in, a mother's hand on a shoulder. The details are often the strongest images of the morning anyway, and a small room pushes you towards them rather than away.
Managing the light in one small space
One window, one kind of light. That is the target, and it usually means switching the ceiling light off and closing the bathroom door. It will feel darker to everyone in the room, and it will look considerably better in the pictures, because the mixture of warm bulbs and cool daylight on the same face is what makes skin tones go strange.
If the window light is harsh direct sun, a plain net curtain softens it beautifully. If there is no net, a white sheet held or pinned across the window does the same job. If the window is small and the room is dark, sit people right beside it rather than in the middle of the floor, because light falls off very quickly with distance.
What to ask when you book the room
- Is there a window, and roughly which way does it face? A room with a decent window beats a larger room without one.
- How many people will actually be in there? Eight people, two artists and a photographer in a standard hotel room is not a room, it is a queue.
- Is there a second space nearby? A lounge, a stoep, a landing with a window. Somewhere to step out to for a few quieter frames makes an enormous difference.
- What happens during load shedding? Hair and makeup depend on power, and a room lit only by a window when the schedule slips is a very different morning. It is worth confirming that the venue's backup covers the getting-ready rooms.
What to accept
A small room gives you a more intimate, closer set of images and fewer wide, room-showing frames. There will be less variety of background, because there is only one good corner. Some pictures will include a bit of the mess, and honestly they should, because a wedding morning is not a tidy event and photographs that pretend otherwise lose something.
Clear one corner, open one curtain, switch off one light, and a room barely big enough to turn around in becomes a perfectly good place to photograph the best hour of the day.
