Choosing a good dressing room will have a profound impact on the quality of your wedding preparation pictures. Keep the following guidelines in mind when selecting your dressing room.

Bridal Dressing Room at the Liberty Grand

• Decorate the women’s dressing room just as carefully as you would any other part of the wedding location because a large portion of your wedding pictures will be taken here.
• When you choose a location for the dressing room, pick a room which is spacious and that has lots of natural light.
• On the wedding day, have the women clean up all the non-wedding messes, such as piles of non-wedding related clothing (e.g., blue jeans, running shoes, etc.), but don’t make the room too neat and tidy; messes are okay if they are wedding messes. Empty boxes and bags should be placed somewhere outside the dressing room.
• It looks wonderful to have all the dresses hanging and shoes lying around on the floor, but they look awful and unappealing if they are still in the box, or if they have piles of plastic wrappers and cardboard boxes lying next to them.
• Flowers also look much better in some sort of vases instead of the cardboard boxes the florist packed them in.
• Cover up any ugly furniture with plain white cloth or sheets.
• A full-length mirror is useful not only for getting dressed and making adjustments, but can also help create some wonderful, spontaneous portraits of the bride as she is getting ready.
• Lighting is extremely important for the women’s dressing room. The windows absolutely must be open to bring in the natural light. If you have anything distracting or unsightly that would be visible through the open windows, place some light, gauzy curtains over them to cut back on the view while still allowing the natural light to come in.
• If you have no window light, think romance, and get creative. Use lots of candles or little Christmas lights placed around the room.
• Shafts of sunlight streaming in the windows may look great to human eyes, but that extreme level of brightness in an otherwise dark room is a photographer’s nightmare. If you must use a room with direct sun on the windows, put up some curtains to diffuse it. You can also put light cotton cloth over the outside of the window to cut down on the direct sun.
• If you want the absolute best lighting for your dressing room, pick a room with large, north-facing windows. This is a photographer’s dream come true because plenty of natural light will come in, but harsh, direct sunlight will not.