Most of Tampa Wedding Photographers would agree with me that Spring is probably our busiest time of the year. And first half of this year was no exception, if, in fact, is not my busiest ever! I’ve been privileged to photograph many beautiful weddings as well as fun engagement sessions. Striving to deliver your pictures as fast as possible, sometimes I fall behind on blogging; however, now I am ready to catch up and share with you my most recent work!

Today, I’d like to open with a very unique and fun engagement session which I photographed just few weeks ago. Most of it took place on a beautiful luxury yacht – Leopard 39. Salim had few other ideas for this special occasion, including a hot air baloon ride, but I’m kind of glad he settled on a yacht instead

On a sunny weekend afternoon, Fatima, Salim, myself and Rich (a videographer from BluePoem Studios, Miami, FL) departed from St. Petersburg marina and set our sails into the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike most of the engagement sessions I photographed before, shooting on a yacht posed its own set of challenges. Major one was the fact that I could no longer control the light. When shooting in downtown Tampa or in a park of St. Pete, or even on a beach in Sarasota I can always choose where and how to pose my couple in relation to the sun. I love working with shades, around structures, trees, etc. In this case, the choice was pretty much limited to… noneWe were in the open seas under the hot summer Florida sun blasting pretty much at full power. During this period of the day I decided to mostly shoot wide angle, including lots of water and various elements of the yacht. This allowed me to minimize the impact of the rather harsh light we had to work with. Another challenge was limited number of angles I could take, and the very few that were available – Rich and I had to take turns and share! It did work out quite well in the end, because we both had tons of ideas and while one of us was shooting, the other one was preparing for the next setup.

As the sun made its way towards the horizon, the light became a lot softer which finally opened up a lot of opportunities for beautiful and romantic portraits. As we finally docked at the marina, the sun was completely gone. However, we still were not ready to call it a day. Instead, we headed to downtown St. Pete and photographed a couple of series around the museum of fine arts. I especially loved shooting wide angle again, including as much architecture as possible while silhouetting Fatima and Salim.

Rich ended up working with the couple next day as well. They shot incredibly funny clip at the Renaissance Tampa International Plaza Hotel (Mariott) which, mixed with the footage from the yacht, became the opening video at Fatima and Salim’s reception few days later. My slideshow from this session was playing on the two 10×8 feet screen of the reception room through the entire evening. I will blog Fatima and Salim’s Sangeet party and reception images soon. In the meantime, enjoy some of my favorite picks below and reception introduction clip by the BluePoem Studios at the bottom of this post!

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Tampa wedding photography is an exciting field in itself, but what makes it even more fun are all the engagement sessions we, Tampa wedding photographers, get to shoot in between the weddings. These photo shoots give couples a chance to get more comfortable in front of the camera and learn the photographer’s style of shooting, directing and posing. At the same time we, wedding photographers, use this opportunity to learn more about the couple – what works and what doesn’t in terms of angles, posing, prompting and directions for each and every person we work with.

I love it when brides get creative about their photo sessions too. I always welcome ideas about possible locations, poses, looks, etc. Sometimes couples would email me pictures they find online and ask if we could try to shoot something similar. Almost always these are very cool ideas which I often end up incorporating in my future shoots. And of course I love it even more, when some of those pictures they dig up are actually shots from my previous engagement sessions!

In fact, one day I got a call from a couple who fell in love with Maria and Alex’s engagement session I had shot just few months before. They loved it so much that they wanted to shoot exact same session. Since downtown Tampa and University of Tampa are two of my favorite spots for wedding as well as engagement pictures, I was very happy to do the shoot. I was a bit nervous, of course, because what works for one couple may not necessarily be a good fit for another. But in fact, Beemal and Sonal ended up being just as easy going and fun as Maria and Alex and we had blast.

We began shooting at the Curtis Hixon park in downtown Tampa, a favorite location of mine and probably every other Tampa wedding photographer’s. Unfortunately, the main fountains were off that day, but we still managed to get few awesome pictures with the smaller ones in the back of the park. We took a few photos on the grass by the museum and we headed off to the University of Tampa campus. When we got there, Beemal and Sonal changed their outfits and we continued the shoot. As the sun was getting closer and closer to the horizon we made our way to the Hillsborough river where we concluded our photo shoot with few spectacular pictures by the water and downtown in the background.

Here are few of my favorites, hope you’ll enjoy them!

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