How to photograph what she feels

OK, so how do you photograph how the bride really feels on her wedding day? Well I haven't quite figured that out yet but today I had some fun trying to portray it through a little photoshop fun. I'll try to show you the basics of what I did, yet the real knowledge of how to do it comes through practice and experimentation (mostly experimentation).

I was lucky in the fact that the wind was blowing at her outdoor reception at a pretty good clip(which isn't really a good thing most of the time) so we shot some images with the wind having fun with her veil and dress. I then took the image and with a mask extracted her from the background. (You can't see it here but after the extraction I still had a lot of the windows etc. showing through the veil. A problem I hadn't really thought about.)

Then I was lucky again in the fact that as I drove the 14 miles home from church I was watching some beautiful fluffy clouds as they constantly changed shapes while oving across the sky. That gave me an idea so when I got home and had a couple hours to relax (which doesn't happen very often) , I set my camera up on a tripod and every 8 seconds took a picture of the same section of the sky and landscape. I plan on making it into a movie clip that I may put on the blog later. For today though one of the images served the purpose of giving me a Cloud 9 for the bride to be floating through the sky with on her wedding day.

I then put the two images together and of course cropped the cloud shot way down and then resized it to fit the image of the bride. I had to change the direction of the cloud so the light would appear to be coming from the same direction. Then I had to lower the opacity of the veil so I could basically remove the obvious outlines of the house showing through.

I then added a faded white border to the image to give it an extra special feel of serenity.

And finally removed the color just to have some more fun. 

Now maybe she wasn't really feeling like she was on cloud 9 or even floating with it but that wasn't how I interpreted what her actions were portraying. I think most brides really do float through the day and thus the one thing that brings it all back are the photographs. (Even if they are created in photoshop.)