G Hotel Galway | Styled Wedding Photography | Behind The Scenes

Wedding photography shoot using natural light, video light, strobe lighting & photo editing techniques

This was one of my favourite wedding shoots to date; you cannot always rely on the Irish weather when photographing weddings & the idea was to take wedding album worthy images using only interior spaces. The G hotel Galway kindly offered us the use of their hotel so we focused the shoot in the Bridal Suite, the Linda Evangelista Suite & the Grand Salon lounge. I love to use light & shadow in my imagery so avoided using on camera flash, focusing instead on alternative lighting techniques to provide soft directional light which provides depth & dimension in the final images.

wedding photography g hotel galway behind scenes

Belladonna Bridal Galway kindly provided two wedding dresses, the Michelle by Novia D'Art and Roma by Fara Sosa. The detail in these dresses is exquisite so I really wanted to do justice to those dresses by bringing out sharp detail & texture in the images. A wedding dress is often the most expensive part of a wedding and should be photographed to showcase it's texture & detail; a pet peeve of mine is when I see wedding dresses over exposed to pure white in photos and all detail in the dress is lost. The second photographer on this shoot, Kathy Brady Photography is the second photographer on all my wedding shoots so we instinctively knew the type of imagery we were looking to produce on the day. The photos on this shoot do have a fashion look & feel to them and while we typically shoot lots of natural candid images at weddings, it's good to have the option to provide variety in the style of photos available to our couples.

Wedding photography Layer Blending Photoshop

The Linda Evangelista Suite at the G hotel Galway is a stunning setting for bride & groom getting ready shots. For this photo, there was ample light in the suite but it lacked the direction we needed for the shot we had in mind. Positioning the camera for a strong center composition, which had the additional benefit of hiding my reflection in the bathroom mirror, we asked Erin to look towards the side mirror in the bathroom and we illuminated her with a softbox which was hidden in the bathroom behind the left-hand side wall. You can see the reflection of the softbox in the bathroom mirrors but that was removed in the final version of the image. Next we added a hint of light on Wayne to balance the window light coming from behind him and took a final shot with only natural light. I was not gone on the position of Erin's right hand but loved her expression so the last piece to the puzzle was to merge her hand from another image where her hand was placed just under her shoulder. Merging the 4 images together in photoshop provided the result below which showcases the suite in it's best light so to speak.

The whole process took less than 2 minutes so it's a technique that can be incorporated into a real wedding. Shooting fast and moving on to the next image is something we have become accustomed to as getting a couple back to their hotel reception, in plenty of time to mingle with guests before meal sit-down is always appreciated by our couples. Wedding g hotel galway gerard conneely photography

Bride & Groom in the Linda Evangelista Suite at the G hotel Galway

Belladonna Bridal & Corless Formalwear Galway generously provided two wedding dresses & a groom's suit for the shoot. Thank you also to Go Dutch flowers who provided the flower bouquet and to AislingK for makeup & Donna Lydon for hair styling. Below is a snippet of my favourite images from the day. The images below are 1/7th of the origional high resolution size displayed at 72dpi with reduced detail for screen viewing, the full size high resolution images in print at 300dpi contain immense detail which is one of many reasons to opt for a wedding album when choosing wedding packages with any photographer, not just myself. Like any photographic image, they look even better in print...

Wedding g hotel galway gerard conneely photography photo