Photographer Nick Frontiero is no stranger to this venue, the Warehouse at the Alley in Montgomery, Alabama. “It seems like I’ve photographed here a billion times,” he says. So when this bride was getting ready and putting on her dress, he knew just the room to pose her in: the one with the two enormous windows letting in beautiful natural light. The bridesmaids were just about done helping the bride as this moment unfolded. “I already could kind of visualize this image,” he says, “so as the bridesmaids finished and stepped out of the frame, I just asked the bride to hang out there for a minute alone and I released the shutter.”

The result is a dramatic yet soft portrait that is, for Frontiero, effortless. “After spending years photographing and post-processing your own images, you get to a point in your career when you see a moment, you photograph it, you color-correct and edit in post, and before any of that happens, you already know what the end result will be,” he says. But, as experienced as he may be and as many times as he’s been to this venue and photographed in this room, he says, “it took the right bride in the right dress with the right light at the right moment for me to really see this image.”

(Captured using a Canon 5D Mark IV and 85mm f/1.2 lens at f/3.5, 1/100th of a second and ISO 250.)

Photo © Nick Frontiero

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