Our Venetian Photoshoot - Behind the Scenes!

While in Italy, but before our holiday, we had planned a fantastic bridal shoot in Venice. It has been a dream of mine to shoot a bridal scene there for a long time, so it was really exciting to finally see all my plans come to fruition last week for our shoot!

We arrived on Monday afternoon, and after picking up the keys to our apartment, which was by St Mark's Square, we caught the vaperetto to Rialto Bridge to meet up with Venice wedding planner Anna Bozza from theveniceweddingplanner.com, who had organised our shoot locations for us, the dresses and our beautiful flowers. Once we'd met up with Anna, we started to make our way with her across Venice to ultra stylish bridal designer Anna Molin's atelier, which is the only bridal dress shop in Venice, to start trying on dresses and choose the perfect ones for our shoot.

As it was to be an early start the following day, we headed out for an early dinner and then after a quick hour's kip it was back to Piazzale Roma to the bus stop to meet Olly who had come in on the later flight. We were so tired that because all the vaperettos had stopped by midnight we waited for a water taxi, only to be told it was 60 Euros for a five minute journey! We chose to walk instead, which was quite a fun way to see Venice, although my body was crying for bed, ready for an early morning start at 5am Tuesday!

As promised, Anna and Alessandra turned up on time to be welcomed by a bleary-eyed gang and Alessandra set about coiffing Yasmin's hair into a quiff with ponytail and creating smouldering eye makeup. In no time at all, we were off to start shooting first in St Mark's Square - the image I'd had in my mind all those months! (No pressure then!). It was a little trickier than expected due to absolutely loads of scaffolding around the square, and wet ground - which meant we had to put plastic
sheets down to make sure the dress didn't get damaged, but we managed to get some of really beautiful photographs which I think may turn out to be some of my all time faves, so I was really thrilled.

Soon after this, it was back to the apartment to get changed and out to a local cafe for some breakfast and a little break before doing some indoor shots of Yasmin in the typically Venetian master bedroom in one of Anna Molin's stunning gold bridal gowns accompanied with beautiful jewellery from Kutuu and Flo & Percy, which looked really stunning.

Rain stopped us from our initial plan, which was to head out in the afternoon to Burano, but instead we did some more shots inside some of Venice's most lovely hotels (thanks to Anna for organising this!), including one which had only been open one month after years of restoration work. I also managed to persuade Anna herself to do a bit of modeling which I was thrilled about, because she is really beautiful! We were also able to use the terrace and a suite which had fantastic views across the Venetian skyline.

Finally, after a good day's hard work from everyone (my legs were sore after so much walking around Venice!), we went to an apartment overlooking the Rialto Bridge which gave us some really romantic shots as the sun went down.

Here are some behind the scenes shots until I upload the shoot proper!