Downtown Milwaukee Wedding (Brewery District)

I’ve been looking forward to sharing this wedding for a long time and now that it’s my offseason I’ve finally found enough time in between photo editing to put this wedding together and share it with you all.

The reason I love this wedding so much is not only because Eric and Ally made me look so good with their attire and flair, but also because it was a vintage downtown Milwaukee wedding.

In many ways, their wedding was in the heart of Milwaukee. This town is known for its history of breweries and yes, you could make the argument that Miller is the most important of those, but that brewery is not downtown.

The Pabst is downtown and it has nearly if not equal historical distinction as Miller. Pabst Brewery these days is parcel outed into condos and businesses and one of those businesses is Nō Studios and that’s where Ally and Eric had their wedding day.

The whole studio encompassed three floors in one of the buildings in the Pabst Brewery area. On the top floor was the ceremony and reception, on another floor was the dinner and on another floor was the area where Ally got ready.

Outside of it, was the cobblestone streets and factory buildings of Pabst, meaning you could really take vintage Milwaukee wedding portraits.

Getting Ready

As a wedding photographer, the incredible attribute that stood out the most to me about Nō Studios and having a wedding day there, was definitely the floor where Ally got ready beforehand.

It was a simple place, big and spacious and looked like it had been a small factory room. But, it had huge windows to the west. I mean enormous windows and they were angled at the top and framed by more brick, making them simple but stylistic.

They were more than 15 feet high I’m guessing, and right away I had a dream of hanging the dress from the top of the peak. So, fortunately Nō Studios lent me a ladder and a rod with a hook so I climbed the ladder and used the hook to transfer the wedding dress on a hanger to a small hook/nail hanging above the window.

This made me incredibly nervous, because at that point I didn’t have that much control of the dress and I didn’t want to drop it or worse above all things have it get stuck on some rogue nail or snag where I couldn’t get it down.

But, it all worked out just right and I got the photo and another photo of Ally standing in the window next to it.

This is something I’ve incorporated more and more into my dress shots, having not only the wedding dress as a stand alone wedding detail photo, but also asking the bride to stand next to the dress or hold the dress (details with a heartbeat!)

The window also gave me beautiful light for my portraits of Ally getting dressed by her mom and sisters and bridal portraits after that.

If you want one piece of advice for picking a place to get ready is to find a place that’s large enough for me to full length body shots of you and your family/friends helping you get dressed, but also large enough that you keep all your supplies out of the background.

If you’re in a single room, usually I’ll walk in and see bags and clothes lining every wall and every corner.

I usually have to move all of this out of the way before getting the “getting dressed pictures.”

The ceremony

The ceremony was a unique photography location as well, because it had only windows as its background. Now, if this is your case and the windows have direct light, than you are in serious trouble as a photographer. Direct light means that the sun is shining through the windows in full view.

In the morning that’s the eastern side of the building and in the afternoon or evening that’s on the west.

Fortunately, for me we had indirect light behind the ceremony for Eric and Ally. It was still a challenge, because they were backlight, but not impossible. For other wedding photographers, I’ve also found that when you’re in this situation you can get incredible black and white photos of the ceremony where people are lit almost in this halo effect.

Portraits Outside

Taking wedding portraits outside was the one thing that I was worried about and focused on the most heading into their wedding day.

I was worried about it, because although the entire area really is that old brick buildings which make for incredible photographs, I still wanted to find a large space that was out of the sun and off of the street.

I like taking photos in the street, but that works a little bit better when the wedding party is already familiar with working with you and you’ve already crossed off all the basic pictures.

I also didn’t want to ask Eric and Ally to walk a long ways away in case we were running behind time or they were getting tired from the long day already. Fortunately, there was a big courtyard a block away from Nō Studio with trees and nature, which is pretty much my expertise in wedding party portraits.

We took all the wedding party and groomsmen and bridesmaid photos there, plus most of the husband and wife photos. On the walk back, I was able to get a little more creative and I took some photos of them walking in an alleyway and then I took photos of them in direct sunlight in front of a yellow brick factory building.

I’ve experienced more with this direct sunlight photography as supplemental portraits. You still have to be careful with it and work around it, rather than tackling it head on, but direct sunlight can really give things an edgy almost 1990s or 1980s supermodel look. When you succeed at it, it can really burn bright!

Sunset Portraits

If you’re working on your wedding day timeline, always mentally plan for sunset portraits! In Eric and Ally’s case, we had an amazing sunset since we were able to go outside of the top floor of Nō Studios since it had an outdoor patio that was on the eastern and western side of the building. We went out the western side and we were high enough that we were able to see the sun over all the rest of Milwaukee in the distance.

Thank you Eric and Ally for this experience and may you have a beautiful marriage.