A Cinematic Wedding at Lusthaus in Vienna’s Prater

This summer we photographed a wedding at Lusthaus Vienna, right in the middle of the Prater. It was a beautiful and quite energetic wedding, mostly because of the couple themselves and the atmosphere they created around them.

We photographed the day from the beginning of the ceremony until somewhere around 3 or 3:30 in the morning, when the party was already slowing down and people were starting to leave.

For this wedding we also decided to bring one of our studio strobes with me. I didn’t want to use artificial light everywhere, but having more control over the light helps to keep the contrast that we like without making the photographs feel disconnected from how the place actually looked.

From the roughly 550 photographs we delivered from this wedding, we selected around 80 for this gallery. So this is still only a small part of everything that happened during the day.

Keeping a cinematic style believable

We describe our photography as cinematic quite often, but for us that doesn’t mean adding a lot of grain, fading the colours or making every photograph heavily stylised.

We actually want the photographs to remain believable.

Something we often notice in films is that darkness is allowed to look dark. A scene happening in a dim room doesn’t necessarily need to be lifted until everything is perfectly visible. There can be deep shadows, strong highlights and a clear colour palette, while the scene still looks completely natural.

We try to follow a similar principle with wedding photography.

We keep everything believable, but at the same time we use light, contrast, composition and colour to give the photographs more moody direction, elevating atmosphere so to say. Stylised and true to life don’t really have to contradict each other.

Arriving before the ceremony

We arrived around an hour to an hour and a half before the ceremony and started capturing the preparation, the first hugs and just looking around the venue for the strongest compositions.

Working as two photographers also changes how we approach these moments. Fedor tends to focus slightly more on people, reactions, hugs and the general atmosphere. And at the same time Jan can pay more attention to details and experiment with different compositions.

We still photograph across each other’s roles all the time, of course, but having two people gives us much more freedom to look for different pictures rather than both trying to make the same photograph.

We often think about this using the big, medium, small principle.

There are the big photographs showing where everything happens and giving the overall context. Then there are medium frames concentrating on people and interactions. And finally there are all the small things, hands, decorations, glasses, flowers, pieces of clothing and other details.

Together they make the gallery much more complete. Sometimes the little photographs are the ones that make you remember what being there actually felt like. You can almost touch the little textures that we capture on the detail shots.

Photographing the ceremony from two sides

The ceremony is probably one of the moments where having two photographers becomes the most useful.

Fedor can stay close to the couple and concentrate on their expressions and the important moments between them. At the same time, the Jan can photograph the room, the guests and their reactions.

There was also much more freedom to experiment.

At one point, while Fedor stayed inside covering the ceremony, Jan could go outside the Lusthaus and photograph through the windows. The reflections in the glass created images that almost looked like double exposures.

This is the kind of photograph that would be difficult to make when photographing alone. You can’t really leave a ceremony halfway through just to see what the building looks like from outside.

After the ceremony we photographed the guests greeting and hugging the couple. We usually make quite a lot of these photographs. They don’t necessarily end up in our public galleries because there can be dozens of them, but we think they are important for the couple to have. It means everyone who was part of the wedding appears somewhere in their final gallery.

Cake, reception

Afterwards came the cake and the reception. It was a fun and energetic part and apparently the cakes were tasty (at least were looking gorgeous, but we were very occupied with photographing everything). There were also fun moments with kids asking for the cakes but we were asked to not share photos with them.

Short Wedding photoshoot on a Cloudy Afternoon

For around half of the day the weather was cloudy. We actually quite like this kind of light because it is soft and gives us more freedom to push the contrast without trying to be careful about it, as when the light is so soft you can experiment more.

The challenge is that cloudy light can also become very flat and that contradicts our approach to working with light. Flat light is like food without flavour and after all we are artists of light.

That where additional lighting helped us a lot as we could add light only where we wanted it and create more separation between people and their surroundings.

Unfortunately we only had about 15 minutes for a couple photoshoot before the dinner and the light at the moment was dim and flattering, we really felt that having 2 of us there was perfect since here too we made this session much more complete while having such a short window of time for it.

When the sun finally appeared

The light changed completely during dinner.

The sun finally came out and started coming through the windows on the upper floor of Lusthaus. Because the windows there are less covered by the surrounding trees, we suddenly had these very strong rays of evening light cutting through the room.

It was probably my favourite natural light of the entire day.

We photographed quite a lot against it, using people almost as silhouettes and letting the sunlight become part of the composition. In some photographs you can almost see the rays going through the room.

Some of my favourite photographs from the wedding came from this relatively short period.

It is also why we don’t really try to force one consistent lighting setup onto an entire wedding. The light keeps changing throughout the day, and sometimes the best thing is simply to recognise when something interesting appears and work with it.

Photographing the bouquet throw after dark

By the time of the bouquet throw, it was already properly dark outside.

There were some yellow street lamps around the venue, but they weren’t particularly useful photographically, so we decided to light the moment ourselves.

We placed one light behind the bushes towards the group waiting for the bouquet and another closer to the building to illuminate the bride and the area around her.

Again, being able to photograph the moment from two directions helped. A bouquet throw happens once and very quickly, so having two completely different views of it gives us much more to work with afterwards.

Candles, coloured lights and the beginning of the party

Once it became dark, the whole atmosphere of the wedding changed again.

Candles appeared on the tables and the DJ switched on his lights, which were constantly changing colour. Before the party properly started, we used the candles and darker room for a few quieter photographs.

Then we started experimenting with the DJ lighting.

Instead of trying to remove the coloured light or overpower it, I wanted to work with it. The only problem was that one source of coloured light could sometimes make the photographs look quite flat and remove texture from people’s faces and clothes.

So I placed another light on the opposite side of the room and made it into a narrow beam.

As the DJ lights changed colour, we could wait for combinations where the two lights worked well together and created separation between people, the room and the background. As you will see below we cached the moments when my colour was complementary to the DJ’s.

Photographing a very energetic party

The time came for the first dance where Fedor was focusing on broader shots with the couple and Jan was capturing closeups.

The couple and their guests did the rest. There were glowing sticks, different props, coloured lights from our and DJ’s side and people constantly moving through the room. We also used some of the creative filters that we had been experimenting with throughout the wedding.

Modern cameras make it possible to photograph surprisingly quickly even when the room is very dark, so we could move around the party and keep photographing from different directions while still using the lights to create a main light, contour light and strong shadows.

In some photographs the light created shadows from the large chandelier across the room. I also used the plants around the venue to cast shadows onto the walls, which gave some of the images a slightly stranger and more mysterious atmosphere.

Everything came together in that frame: the movement, people around her, the light, the shadows and the general chaos of the party.

I think we managed to make the party look as crazy as it actually felt and as always with a cinematic touch.

A full wedding at Lusthaus Vienna

We started photographing at around 3 in the afternoon and stayed until around 3 or 3:30 in the morning.

By that point the party was slowly winding down and guests were starting to leave.

Looking through the final gallery afterwards, what I like most is how much the atmosphere changes throughout the photographs. It starts with soft cloudy daylight, moves through the ceremony and reception, suddenly becomes warm and bright when the sun appears during dinner, and eventually turns into this much darker world of candles, coloured lights and movement.

As we finished photographing and went home, the biggest part of work was awaiting us. We had about 6000 images on 4 memory cards and about 70 hours of editing was ahead of us. We edit each gallery with attention to make it a full story yet dynamic and enjoyable, so probably the biggest work is crafting the final gallery.

Planning your wedding?

We are wedding photographers based in Berlin, photographing weddings across Germany and Europe.

If you like this kind of cinematic, documentary approach and want your wedding photographed with the same attention to atmosphere, light and all the smaller moments around the day, you can get in touch with us and tell us what you are planning.