Fun bridal portraits at Brookgreen Gardens, Holiday Cottage

It was nice going to the Holiday Cottage in Brookgreen Gardens without actually being there for the wedding ceremony.  I always get some nice shots of the bride at the cottage area, but it’s nice to have a whole hour just to concentrate on the one thing without being rushed.  This gives me enough time to be able to switch lenses and set things up a bit more, for example using my 50mm f1.4 almost wide open.  The bride featured here is actually having her wedding in Brookgreen so we were allowed to do pictures in the area without any additional charge.  I talked to Sally Gomez, the manager of private events at this location, and as I had heard, she told me it’s a $200 charge to do pictures for an hour in the gardens. This may seem like a lot of money, but you are getting personal service at the cottage and it’s just a beautiful area for pictures. So I would highly recommend considering making the investment if these type of pictures are something you are interested in.

The bride pictured here had a lot of creative ideas and wanted to do shots with the idea of her trying to be the perfect wife, but messing up quite a bit.  She actually brought a tray of burnt cookies and some shirts with burn marks from the iron to use as props. I think everything turned out really nice, I pictured in my mind what we would do and I think it pretty much turned out just like I had wanted, hopefully the bride feels the same way.  I knew from past experience that a lot of nice window light comes into the cottage, and I think I was able to capture it.  After we did shots in the cottage we went out to the lake and then to the gate area where they usually have the wedding ceremonies.  The old gate and brick wall is one of my favorite spots in that area.  I had this bride do a similar shot of walking through the gate that really worked well for me in the past.  I also love some shots of the bride against the gate with the way she is framed by the foliage, hopefully for the actual wedding at the end of March there might be some flowers as well.  I had some more ideas for shots to try, but the hour we were allowed went pretty quickly.  I got about 20 or 30 really good ones, so it was plenty.  I will post some of my favorites below.  If you like some of these please let me know in the comments section below, and don’t forget to follow me on Facebook to keep up to date with my latest pictures.