Trash the dress shoot on the beach

One of my resolutions this year was to arrange more shoots for myself, just for fun. Up until this shoot I had already done a couple of shoots like this, one at Chetham’s Library in Manchester and a portrait shoot on the beach. These shoots are great for me to play around with new ideas and try things out without pressure. So when my friend and amazing model Louisa said she was interested in doing a trash the dress shoot on the beach where she would be happy to go in to the sea too, I couldn’t resist!

I went in to the shoot with ideas for just three specific shots; a photograph of Louisa’s foot walking through a pool of water, a photograph of Louisa lying on the sand on the beach with her reflection in the water, and finally a shot of Louisa as a silhouette in the sea at sunset. Rather than go in to a shoot without a plan and just make it up as I go along, I find that having the intention of just taking, and then tweaking, a very small number of images works really well for me. As we had two hours on the beach, I had enough time to try and perfect each of these ideas in turn.

Louisa, my bride for the shoot, was wearing one of my wedding dresses and I really didn’t care what happened to it, in fact I was fully prepared for the wedding dress to be so ruined by the end of the shoot that we would just put it in a bin in the car park – this was a trash the dress shoot after all! That also helped as I didn’t worry in the slightest about what happened to the gown so I could just shoot with complete freedom.

Bride walking in to the sea

A huge thank you to Louisa who was absolutely incredible to work with. Louisa didn’t bat an eyelid when I asked her to lie on the sand or walk in to the sea, she was absolutely brilliant. And a special thank you to my friend Alex too who came on the shoot and helped me, especially for when he moved my camera bag when Louisa and I were in the sea, just as it was about to be swept away in the surf!

As well as my favourite trash the dress photographs, I have also put a short behind the scenes video of the shoot at the bottom of this post so you can see how I took these photographs 🙂

Behind the scenes video: