Pre-wedding Portrait Shoot – Behind the Scenes with Rahul Khona

In this tutorial, Rahul Khona takes you through one of his Pre-Wedding sessions and shares the images he made,  and tips on how he made them. Including posing, location scouting, composition and how to speed up your workflow

Rahul Khona shares some images from a recent Pre-wedding shoot in Mumbai – Along with a ‘Behind the Scenes’ video from the session and below, shares some tips and advice for how he approaches shoots like this. Including, keeping things simple, white balance, scouting and more!

When shooting portraits in natural light, my first consideration is always the quality of light I’m going to be shooting in. Pre-wedding shoots, like the example here, I always shoot during sunset, but sometimes at sunrise too. Photographing during sunset aka ’Golden Hour’ is definitely my favourite time of the day, when the sun is low, the light becomes warm, soft, super flattering in any direction and it give’s my images an ethereal feel.

I always shoot everything from portraits to documentary in manual, as I always want full control over my camera. So firstly I set my white balance to my personal taste using the K temp. Setting the custom white balance beforehand saves you tons of time on editing. When shooting destination pre-wedding shoots, I like to keep things very simple, so I can engage with my couple more, and not have to faff about with tons of equipment. The series here was all photographed with one camera, my Canon 5d mkiv, and one lens Canon 35mm 1.4L, with my camera in manual mode, normally set to around iso 100,  aperture f2.0 as a starting point, and by adjusting the shutter accordingly to get the look I want – the camera settings for each image can be seen in the video.

Shooting during golden hour, you can use the natural light in many ways, you can create beautiful lens flares, by placing your couple in front of the sun, and shooting straight into the light, making sure your lens is wide open, or using the direction of the light, and shooting from different angles. By just simply moving yourself around and by tweaking the aperture and shutter speeds slightly, you can create different looks all whilst the couple are in the same pose. This for me is the best way to get a variety of ‘looks’ that I can deliver to my couple.

For this session, the couple chose the location and I didn’t scout it out beforehand. I just went onto google the night before and searched for ‘sunset insert town name’, just to see what it was like. We planned to meet 2hrs before actual sunset, so then we can roam around together, get to know each other as this was the first time we had met, whilst I was also continually searching for good interesting light to shoot in.  Another great tool is the ‘Sunseeker’ App which you can download onto your phone – it shows you exacty when and where the sun will set using your phone camera in real time. Super useful for working out where to be and when the light will be killer.

Keeping things simple by using one camera, one lens and shooting at sunset, I was able to create a variety of portraits, and even though we spent the best part of 2.5hrs together, with me shooting over 2000 images, I only delivered 36 images in the final set. Less is more is key – I cannot stress that enough.

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