Category : Hartford, CT

Hartford's wedding venues are grand interiors, and that is a consequence of economic history rather than an accident. For a long stretch this was one of the wealthiest cities in the country on the strength of insurance and finance, and institutions of that kind expressed permanence through architecture: marble banking halls, panelled clubs, hotel ballrooms with plasterwork and chandeliers, all built in the decades either side of nineteen hundred and built to impress. The venues in this collection are all of that type, which means they share one governing technical condition and it is the most useful thing to understand before working in any of them.

These are interiors where the light is brought rather than found. A domed banking hall is lit by fixtures well beneath its ceiling; a panelled club absorbs rather than reflects; a ballroom's light sources are chandeliers that sit in the frame and are far brighter than anything they illuminate. Windows, where they exist, are modest by modern standards and often shaded by the surrounding city. So there is no room in this group that can be photographed on available light at a sensible quality, and a photographer arriving with one on-camera flash and no plan will struggle in all three.

Two lights and stands, or a very fast lens and a tolerance for noise. The surfaces divide sharply and the division decides the lighting plan room by room, so check every ceiling on arrival. Pale plaster and pale marble are efficient bounce surfaces: one light aimed at a wall or a ceiling lifts a room by a stop and a half and leaves no evidence of having done so, which is the cleanest way to light a period interior and the reason a plastered ballroom is easier than it looks.

Dark timber panelling is the opposite: it reflects perhaps ten or fifteen per cent of the light falling on it against eighty for plaster, so a light aimed at panelling comes back weak and strongly orange and most of it does not come back at all. In a panelled room the technique inverts completely — light directly with one modifier close and feathered, and let the darkness do the separating, because a background four or five stops down records as almost nothing and gives you clean subject separation without a long lens or a wide aperture. That takes about ninety seconds per position and it repeats anywhere.

Warm whatever you bring, in every one of these buildings. The ambient is filament, table lamps and chandeliers, which is very warm, and a neutral flash in that light reads distinctly cold and looks inserted. And do not average the colour: choose the dominant source, balance for it, gel your own light to match, and let the rest fall — averaging is what makes grand interiors photograph grey and dead. Two further recurring facts.

Polished floors, which all three of these venues have in some form, are reflective: a lit subject standing on marble, terrazzo or parquet gets a second dimmer image beneath them for nothing, and a wide frame with a strongly lit couple on a polished floor is doubled without any effort — but get the camera down to a metre, because from standing height a floor is just a surface. It also means every light you put up appears twice, so check the frame for reflections of your own stands.

And a frame that includes a window and a face at the same time carries about five stops, which no single exposure holds: expose for the room and let the window blow to white, which reads perfectly well as a room with light coming in, or light the subject hard enough to balance the view, which needs real output. The middle gives a dim face and a grey window.

Downtown Hartford outside these buildings is better than its reputation and it provides the variety that a single grand room cannot. The core carries a dense stock of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century commercial architecture in stone, brick, terracotta and bronze — the same material world as the interiors, which means exterior frames made within a block sit naturally alongside them. Two specific places are worth walking to.

A large public park sits by the downtown core, one of the first publicly funded parks in the country, and in it stand a monumental memorial arch of the eighteen-eighties — an arch being a frame with a built-in border and genuine scale — and a historic carousel, which is a dense field of painted colour and mirrors and an entirely different register from a marble or panelled room.

And the state capitol stands on rising ground above that park, a high-Victorian building with a gold-leafed dome, which from the park reads as a terminated vista at the end of a green foreground: a genuinely good long frame that costs nothing but a short walk. Whether either is usable for a ceremony is a conversation with the city or the park authority rather than with a venue, and a commercial photography permit is likely to be required — ask early, and expect members of the public to be present.

The reliable street fallback is two things available within a block of almost any downtown venue: a large flat field of stone or brick to use as a background at a long focal length, and a deep doorway or arch that produces a band of open shade in front of it. The second is the answer to the middle of a summer day. Hartford sits at about forty-two degrees north in a humid continental climate with four genuinely distinct seasons, and the latitude gives one useful number: civil twilight runs roughly thirty-one minutes in midsummer, with a usable balance point of thirteen to sixteen minutes.

That is among the longer dusks in this library and generous enough for two exterior positions if both are decided in advance. The midsummer noon sun reaches about seventy-two degrees, meaningfully lower than the South's, so midday outdoors still has some direction in it and open shade functions properly rather than merely tolerably. The midwinter noon sun sits near twenty-five degrees and rakes stone facades from late morning to mid-afternoon, which is the best exterior light of the year and lasts for hours rather than minutes.

Season by season, late September into early November is the strongest window: the summer humidity drops out so the air clears and stone reads crisply, temperatures are comfortable for walking in formal clothing, sunset lands around six so the dusk window falls at a civil hour, and New England's colour peaks in the second half of October — which in a city means street trees and a park rather than hillsides, but it is genuine and it is brief. May into June is the other good window, mild and lengthening, with the park at its best and sunset after eight by late June.

Summer is entirely workable with the middle of the day given to the interiors, which at these venues costs nothing at all: a marble hall, a panelled club room or an internal ballroom is identical at every hour, so the worst three hours of a July day are free. July dewpoints around seventy fill shadows by roughly two stops outdoors, softening shadow edges and keeping detail in eye sockets, at the cost of a pale washed sky and a lens that fogs within seconds coming out of an air-conditioned building into humid air.

Thunderstorms move through quickly in the warm months, and the half hour afterwards is the best exterior light of the year here: washed air, wet stone and wet pavement several tones darker and far more saturated, reflections in the street doubling everything, and a low sun coming under a broken ceiling into a street canyon. Wet stone is a considerably better material than dry stone, so if a cell goes through at six, do not pack.

Winter is long and genuinely cold, with sunset before half past four in late December, snow in most years and temperatures well below freezing — which puts the balance point before five, during cocktails rather than after dinner, and therefore a named item on the timeline, and which limits any outdoor session to minutes rather than an hour. In exchange, winter is when this whole category of venue is at its strongest, and it is worth saying to a couple.

The value of a grand interior is entirely independent of the season: a marble hall or a panelled club room is identical in January and July, so a winter wedding here is essentially unaffected by the weather, while filament and chandelier lighting read at their best against early darkness and the booking will be both easier and cheaper than an October one. Outside you get the clearest air of the year and a low sun raking stone facades all afternoon, with bare street trees letting the architecture read cleanly.

The hazard to plan for is the nor'easter, which brings wind and heavy wet snow to this coast and is a travel problem for guests and suppliers rather than a photographic one, so a winter date deserves a contingency that assumes some people cannot drive. And one instruction applies at all three venues, in every month: photograph the rooms empty in the first twenty minutes you are on site, before the tables and the chairs and the flowers arrive.

A domed hall, a panelled dining room or a dressed ballroom with nobody in it is one of the finest architectural subjects the city offers, and once it is dressed for a wedding you will not see it again that day.