Trash the Dress

The wedding is over; your guests have all gone home. The venue just packed up the last of your centerpieces and you finally leave for a blissful honeymoon on an exotic Caribbean island. When you get home your answering machine has a message from your photographer. "The photos look great and should be ready soon, so when are we trashing your dress?"

Say what?!

Trash the Dress photography sessions are extreme bridal portraits – from "tame" trashing such as walking in a riverbed or lying in the grass, to as extreme as the bride would like to get – mud, paint, even scissors! A Trash the Dress photo session brings the bride, her photographer and maybe even the groom together, to do it all again. Don the gown and tux for more bridal portraits; but in a unique way that expresses the bride's personality and have a lot of fun doing it. Trash the dress sessions are also called extreme bridals, anti-bridals, and We Did sessions.

The goal of a great trash session is to express the bride's personality in a unique and fun way while showing off the bridal gown. Some trash the dress ideas include using water, mud, fall colors, paint and city streets to create memorable, artistic bridal portraits in situations a bride would *never* go into before the wedding. The vast majority of trash sessions are done immediately after the wedding or at the one year anniversary of the marriage.

Trash the Dress has grown over the last year or two from a few shots that gained national recognition from Las Vegas wedding photographer John Michael Cooper. Cooper's "anti-bridals" include a bride lying in a river with full makeup, homage to Shakespeare's Ophelia and his bride lit on fire image (Photoshop!) No brides were harmed in the making of this image.

For more information, the unofficial Trash the Dress website is TrashtheDress.com which lists many recommended photographers and shows off images from previous trash the dress sessions.

Matt & Sarah Antonino are the owners of Picture Infinity Studios and are the NY state coordinators for Trash the Dress.