I took a wedding photography workshop with my favorite wedding photographer, David Beckstead, last year to try to learn some new techniques. One of the things we focused on was finding reflections in compositions. At the time I thought it was opening my eyes up to a whole new world, but then I went back and looked at some of my work from nearly a decade ago.

As it turned out, I was using reflections in compositions all the way back to the first wedding I had every photographed.  I just wasn’t aware that I was doing it.  I think a lot of photography is like that. We will learn a new technique and discover we were doing it the entire time.  It is like when a beginning photo student first learns the rule of thirds and then discovers that their favorite images from their past followed that rule.

The below images represent some of my favorite reflections compositions.  I have intentionally avoided any of the traditional “bride looking in a mirror” photographs and instead chose to show some of my more abstract uses of reflection.