The Last Word — Yervant: Dancing Under Umbrellas

How do you create a harmonious portrait of a bride and her 15 bridesmaids when they’re each wearing a different style and color of dress? Australia’s Yervant faced this dilemma while photographing a wedding at an Australian winery. He faced not only an incongruent mix of color, material and design among the bridesmaids dresses, but also a hot Australian sun and a stark landscape made up of heavily reflective surfaces and very few background opportunities.

“The reception was scheduled almost immediately after the marriage ceremony, so I had very little time to take the wedding party portraits,” says Yervant. “I had to think fast and come up with something both artistic and spectacular while working with less-than-perfect circumstances.
“The only common components among the 15 bridesmaids were the Asian umbrellas they used throughout the shoot to keep them cool under the sun,” he says. “They were very pretty and colorful, and they made beautiful images, but I felt that a well crafted, black-and-white image would have an even stronger impact than color—especially if I finished it in my signature black-and-white art style.”

Shooting with a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, Yervant saw all the girls waiting with their umbrellas as he descended a staircase. “I saw this beautiful image from above, so I asked the bridesmaids to put their umbrellas a little closer together and stand directly under each one,” says Yervant. “Then I asked the bride to dance in amongst the umbrellas.”

“I had a few magical seconds to capture some beautiful expressions, but this was my favorite,” he says. “I worked on it using my own set of Photoshop actions to create a signature piece of black-and-white wall art.”
The photo was captured at 1/200 second at f/8 and ISO 125 with a focal length of 50mm. In postproduction Yervant converted the image to black and white using his Photoshop action, Yervant B&W, which is part of a new actions pack: Yervant—Dancing with Photoshop ACTIONS, Volume 2. He darkened the edges of the image as well as the area outside the bride’s parameters using a Vignette from his ACTIONS and used the Diffuse Glow filter in Photoshop CS4 on the umbrellas. Visit Yervant’s website: www.
yervant.com.au.

Kim Brady has been a writer and editor in the photo-imaging market for more than 27 years. She was editor of the first digital imaging magazine, Photo-Electronic Imaging (PEI), and executive editor of The Professional Photographer. The Atlanta-based writer continues to write for imaging magazines and websites around the world.