At the end of the second day celebrating couple Taylor and Brian’s wedding, photographer Jerry Ghionis made his way with wife Melissa and the happy bride and groom to the top of a parking garage to take a picture against the Houston skyline. “Next door to the parking lot was a bright orange wall with some trees silhouetted in front of it,” says Ghionis, “and I thought to myself as we passed by that those trees were just begging to be photographed. I took a few images on the rooftop, but I wasn’t really feeling any of them so I suggested that we go down and use the scene I had spotted next door. The obvious thing to do would be to pose Taylor (a wedding photographer herself) against the wall and turn her face up to the light (the sun) for a stylized, fashionable image…but I wanted to do something not as obvious as that.” Instead he decided to mirror the trees and also have the couple silhouetted against the contrasting color of the bright orange wall.

If you look closely, he adds, the shape around the couple perfectly matches and mirrors the trees that frame them. “The ultimate question is whether this is a posed portrait or did they just dance on their own while I photographed them?” Regardless, Ghionis says this was perhaps his favorite frame of the day.

“To quote my good friend and wonderful photographer, Dennis Orchard, who saw this image on social media, ‘Such magical, spontaneous, graceful movement captured in the silhouette from this couple. Not even a trace of a directed pose (although I’m sure Jerry gently coaxed them in the move). Master manipulators know when they have made it when you can’t see the seams.’ ”

(Unretouched image shot with a Nikon D5 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 1/250sec, f/7.1, ISO 100.)

Photo © Jerry Ghionis

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