Jo and Paul opted for an outdoor ceremony in the beautiful gardens at South Farm followed by the wedding breakfast in the barn.  My coverage started with Paul and the ushers getting ready a couple of hours before the ceremony, with everything in one place I could photograph both the bride and grooms preparations. Paul gave Jo a pair of wedding wellies just in case things turned wet on the farm, nobody expected such lovely weather.

I hope you enjoy the slideshow from Jo and Paul’s wedding at South Farm, watch out for the cute piglets!

Broody hen didn’t seem to notice her babies didn’t look quiet like chicks and soon set about teaching them how to eat the chick crumbs and then kept them warm overnight. This morning the ducklings and mummy hen are enjoying the sunshine in a pen on the lawn and I can’t keep the ducklings out of a paint roller tray full of water and they are already eyeing up my garden pond.

I had a lovely wedding yesterday at South Farm and the photographs will be here later next week, including some very cute piglets. I mustn’t let my children see the piglets as my garden can’t take any more animals.

The weather was unfortunately wet and cold all day but this never gets in the way of good photographs. My coverage started with the grooms preparations around four hours before the ceremony and then moved on to the brides preparations when Matilda arrived from the hairdressers.

My coffee table books have proved very popular with couples looking to own the print ready digital files and a book of beautiful photographs, the coffee table album expands on this by offering the same style and layout with a soft leather cover and thick photographically printed pages.  There is a choice of colours for the leather cover and the option to have a photo cover front or as above a high gloss aluminum sheet printed with the cover photograph. Photographs are printed directly to the pages, if you are looking for an album with photographs mounted in cut apertures please take a look at my Queensberry albums.

Photographs can be used across a double page spread adding impact to your album, the above spread measures 28 inches across.  The albums come with 60 pages as standard, enough space to use all the photographs from your wedding that show the story of your wedding day.  The albums are available in 12″x12″, 14″x10″ or 16″x12″, the photographs above are of a 14″x10″ album.

Above: How the different options stack up.  Bottom – Queensberry 15″x12″ album.  Middle- 14″x10″ coffee table album.  Top – 10″x8″ coffee table book (parent copy).

As a documentary wedding photographer I don’t want to work with big cameras with equally big lenses that shout “photographer” for that reason I switched from Canon 1D series cameras to the 5DII, but even the 5D is on the large size compared to Fuji X series cameras. The shutter is also loud and intrusive on the Canon 5DII and I often curse it during quiet parts of the wedding ceremony, then along came the Fuji X100 with it’s silent shutter and retro styling, I loved the X100 from the start and have used mine at every wedding over the past year. The X100 has a 35mm equivalent lens and I longed for a 50mm equivalent Fuji X200 as the 50mm is my favourite wedding lens, instead Fujifilm gave us the X-Pro1 with interchangeable lenses including a 35mm F1.4 which is the equivalent of a 50mm F1.4 on the Fuji APS-C sensor. The question is would I love the X-Pro1 as much as my X100?

When the camera first arrived in March I seriously considered sending it back, it made a constant chattering sound from the aperture opening and closing as I moved about and this to be honest made me think it was junk. I’d spent the best part of £2000 on a camera I hoped to use for unobtrusive photography and it gave the game away to your subjects by announcing its presence with a rather loud clicking/chattering sound almost constantly as I moved and the light changed.  I boxed the camera back up and it sat on my desk for a week while I thought about what to do.  I had a wedding the following week and decided to take the X-Pro1 along to try it out, I got the camera out for the bridal preps and the clicking aperture drove me crazy. In a quiet room it was very audible.  Later in the day with some ambient noise the clicking wasn’t an issue and I started to enjoy working with the camera, I drove home from the wedding with mixed thoughts but once I had seen the image quality I decided to keep the cameras and email Fuji to ask if they had a fix in the pipeline for the aperture noise.  Fuji told me they were aware of the issue and were looking into ways around it, a firmware update in late April has completely stopped the chattering and I’m left wondering why Fuji released the camera without fixing this first.

With the chattering aperture fixed I started to really enjoy the camera.  Image quality is superb and the 35mm F1.4 is the sharpest lens I own beating even my Canon L series glass.   The above photograph has the sun low in the sky just behind the tree, there is no sign of flare and the 100 percent crop at the top shows just how good the 35mm F1.4 lens is (200 ISO, 1/500th at F4), these are out of camera jpgs.   High ISO results are very impressive and I have to say the camera is as good if not better than a Canon 5DmkII at 3200 ISO and 6400 ISO.  The X-Pro1 will shoot at 12500 ISO and 25000 ISO in jepg although the files start to show a fair bit of noise and loss of fine detail, I probably wouldn’t use anything higher than 6400 ISO for wedding photography.

The question most photographers ask is what the Auto Focus is like on the Fuji X-Pro1.  Well, in good light it is reasonably quick and accurate but when the light drops it does become slow but is accurate and does usually focus eventually.  Clearly this isn’t a camera to use for fast action but that isn’t what it is aimed at anyway.  I don’t chase the action, I tend to focus the camera and then wait for the moment I want and for this style of photography the X-Pro1 is fine.  The AF on my Canon 5DmkII’s isn’t exactly lightning quick but I get on just fine with them too.  Manual focus? Forget it, the X-Pro 1 like the X100 doesn’t really work very well with full manual focus.

So what’s the X-Pro1 like as a wedding camera?  Pretty good actually and it’s so nice to work with a camera that isn’t a heavy brick.  I can’t see myself ever ditching a DSLR in favour of working with just a couple of Fuji X-Pro1′s, but that doesn’t mean the camera doesn’t have it’s place at a wedding. I now tend to photograph the bridal preps with a Fuji X100 and Fuji X-Pro1, the preps are often in a small room and I find big cameras can be intimidating for the bride. I have no use for long lenses during the bridal preps so a 35mm and 50mm lens work fine for me.  During the ceremony I might work with the Fuji and a Canon 5DII with a 70-200mm F2.8, then after the ceremony I’d be happy to go back to using just the Fuji X-Pro1 until later in the day.

Above – 35mm F1.4 lens at F2.8. I was keen to see how the camera would cope with the pattern on the bridesmaid’s blouse (right) as the lack of an anti-aliasing filter could result in moiré. As you can see this was not an issue at all.

Lighting at this venue is very tricky, there are no windows to light the couple and most of the light is coming from the windows in the background. There is also mixed artificial lighting with various colour temperatures.  2500 ISO 1/50th second at F2.8 using the 35mm F1.4 lens.

After I had photographed the first dance using my Canon DSLR cameras I tried out the Fuji X-pro1 in very low light with moving subjects.  The room was very dark and lit with dark blue gels by the DJ. This is 6400 iso, 1/125th second at F1.4. The auto focus did a reasonable job under the very challenging lighting conditions, my Canon 5D mkII was really struggling with the light at this point as well.

In summary the Fuji X-Pro1 seems to suffer from a few niggling issues just like the Fuji X100.  Image quality is as good as the Canon 5DII, but the camera lags behind in other areas and I wouldn’t want to use it as my only wedding camera.  I’m pleased Fuji quickly came up with a solution to the chattering aperture noise which was the biggest issue I had with the camera.  Working with small lightweight cameras is hugely appealing to me as heavy cameras make my back ache after a ten hour wedding, as a documentary wedding photographer I’m also always trying to capture the moment without the subject becoming camera aware, this is sometimes a challenge when working with a large L series Canon lens. I find people largely ignore a small camera as it feels less intimidating.

If you don’t already own a Fuji X100 you will probably be asking which to buy, the X100 or the X-pro1.  At present I’d have to say the X100 is the better buy priced around £700 (The X-pro1 is around £2000 with one lens) and due to it’s ability to work in almost total silence.  If you already own the X100 you will probably love the X-Pro1 which feels very much the better camera in terms of layout and image quality, plus of course you can change the lens.  I’m very excited about the future for this camera, Fuji are planning to release several more lenses over the next two years and I’m sure future firmware updates will iron out the remaining issues.

update 16th May 2012 – two months on

I have now had my Fuji X-pro1 for almost two months and have had a chance to use it at several weddings.  I still have something of a love/hate relationship with the camera and I find a few issues very annoying.  Firstly the battery life is dreadful, I use the optical viewfinder only and occasionally preview the images on the LCD to check the exposure as I’m shooting in Jpg until Lightroom supports the raw files.  I find I get around 150 shots out of a fully charged battery, you certainly need to buy several spare batteries for a full day of shooting.  Next issue is the autofocus, at my last wedding it totally refused to focus on faces in a dim but not dark venue. I had to focus on high contrast areas like a shirt collar, this is a limitation of the contrast detection focus system used on the X-Pro1 and at times is very frustrating.   The positives do outweigh the the negatives and overall I do enjoy using this camera.  Once focus has locked I haven’t found any shutter lag despite what other reviews on the camera have said.  In contrasty light the autofocus is plenty fast enough for me,  it just struggles when the light is low contrast or dark.  For bridal preps this is a fantastic camera and I also love it for mingling during the drinks reception.

Above- 6400iso on the Fuji X-Pro1 using the 35mm F1.4 lens at F1.4.  The autofocus is fine in low light providing there is contrast, the camera focussed very quickly on the Saxophone player.  It isn’t low light that slows down the focusing but a lack of contrast. Image quality at 6400iso is superb and even at 100 percent the image has very little noise and is very sharp (saving for web has reduced the sharpness of the image, but believe me it is pin sharp).

So what exactly is a wedding photojournalist?

Wedding Photojournalism is the art of story telling wedding photography, it has some similarities with photojournalism but isn’t really the same.  I worked as a photojournalist for 12 years before becoming a wedding photojournalist. A photojournalist is employed by a publication to photograph events in a way that shows the story.  A photojournalist might show one side of a story or both sides, the photographs are usually (but not always) accompanied with text or captions. When I worked as a photojournalist I wasn’t bothered about finding the beauty in a situation, instead I presented the viewer with the facts even if they made uncomfortable viewing, I was looking for photographs with impact.  This is where wedding photojournalism differs, as a wedding photojournalist I want to tell the story of your wedding day in a pleasing and beautiful way.  Although photojournalism and wedding photojournalism differ, having a trained eye as a photojournalist is a huge advantage to the wedding photographer.

As a wedding photojournalist my photographs are truthful and have integrity, the story is important to me and each photograph I take is part of that story.

I do not interfere with the story that is unfolding before my eyes and I don’t use clever Photoshop tricks to enhance my photography. Trends come and go, like spot colour, Photoshop filters that make your photographs strange colours and for those with long memories the dreaded brandy glass shot of the 1980′s. I like to think my photography is classic, that you can look through your wedding album in 25 years time and not cringe at the dated photographs. The photograph album will be a record of your day you can pass on to future generations and not something you will want to forget about.

I like to think I’m different to most wedding photographers who claim to offer reportage / photojournalism. Why? Well for one thing I don’t use these terms as a buzzword, I really do work in a totally hands off way (other than a few family groups). I don’t step in when your father is walking with you along the path into Church and say “hang on, can you do that again and look at each other”, to me the moment has gone and when you look back at that photograph it will not have the same meaning as a photograph of what really happened. I constantly look for little moments you will want to treasure, that glance from Dad in the seconds before you walk down the aisle, that tear rolling down your face during the speeches.  I also differ in that my photography is about people, relationships, love and interactions – not about endless detail photographs (who wants a whole page in their album of shoe photographs?), of course I take some photographs of all the little details, but not at the expense of people photography.  Neither do I demand hours of your day for photography, I had a couple visit me recently who said at their friends wedding the photographer took the couple away from the guests for an hour and a half.  If you would like some family group photographs (and I recommend you have a few) it would require about 15 minutes for these and that is the only time of the day I take over and organise people.

I also take a few relaxed photographs of the couple, like the one above. Other than the family groups and a few couple photographs I don’t set anything up or prompt anybody, I don’t arrive at your wedding with preconceived ideas of how your photographs will look, instead I let the day flow and capture what is in front of me.

There are not that many wedding photographers in the UK who work in this pure photojournalism style, I was one of the pioneers of this style at a time when there was maybe only a couple of photographers in The World working like this.  To this day I remain truthful to my principals of wedding photojournalism -

Nothing should be posed (other than a few family groups)

The story is important, each photograph should be part of the story

The wedding day isn’t about the photographer, so they should not dictate what happens

The photographs should contain emotion, the viewer should feel that emotion

For every action there is a reaction and the photographs should show this

The photographer should not be noticed during key parts of the day – like the ceremony

Photoshop should only be used to tweak the photograph, not to change parts of it

A wedding photojournalist should get in with the action, not shoot like a stranger from outside looking in

How I photograph the day -

My coverage usually starts about an hour and a half to two hours before the ceremony when I photograph the brides preparations, this a really lovely time of the day, the bride is excited, the flowers arrive, the bridesmaids arrive.  By comparison the groom tends to get out of the shower and gets dressed in two minutes, so I usually spend more time with the bride and catch up with the groom and ushers having a drink before the ceremony.   During the bridal preps I tend to work with a tiny Fuji X100 camera which has a silent shutter, I find it’s a bit intimidating for the bride to have a photographer with 3 cameras and huge lenses.

Next I am off to the church or ceremony venue to take a couple of scene setter photographs and to capture people arriving. Then I wait for the bride to arrive. During the ceremony I am very discrete and work with quiet cameras. After the ceremony there are usually plenty of hugs to photograph as your family and friends congratulate you. Then it’s off to the reception (unless of course your wedding is all at one venue).

At the reception I mingle and photograph your family and friends as they chat and interact with you and each other.  After about half an hour it is a good time to take any family group photographs you would like, I do these quickly and without fuss and typically we are finished in 15 minutes.  I then go back to mingling with your guests before taking a few scene setter photographs of the room set up for the wedding breakfast.  Once everyone has sat down to dinner I often find the couple spending a few moments alone which makes for a great photographs like the one below.

I do not take photographs of people eating, but I do come into the room between courses to photograph people chatting and to look for great photographs of the two of you together. After dinner it’s on with the speeches, this is a great time for photography. As well as photographing the speaker I’m looking around the room to capture the reactions, like the groom cringing at the Best Man’s speech or the bride wiping away a tear during Dad’s speech.

My coverage usually ends with the dancing, the first dance is often emotional and these photographs make a great ending to your wedding album.

A typical 8 hour wedding day will produce around 300 photographs. They will show the story of your wedding day, the laughter, tears, nervous anticipation and above all the love between you both and your family and friends.  As I drive home from your wedding my job is far from over, I spend around 30 hours editing and processing your photographs, designing your album and making a slideshow and online gallery.

I’m proud to call myself a wedding photojournalist.

Please view a complete wedding to get a feel for my photography –   Complete Wedding in Northamptonshire

So instead of picking a few favourites to show, I’m going to pick some photographs I really like and give me reasons for taking them and the story behind the photograph.

This was from a wedding I photographed in Venice, it was a little unusual as there weren’t any guests – just the couple and myself.  While I was driving to the airport the groom called and asked if I could be a witness as they had an Italian interpretor as a witness but required a second witness as well.  I have photographed a few small weddings with ten or twenty guests, but this was a first for me.

I took this photograph of Sharon, the bride, on the way to the town hall for the ceremony, we caught a water taxi for the journey along the Grand Canal.  I really love this photograph and think it tells the story of the bride on her own traveling to the wedding ceremony.   The lines of the windows lead your eye into the centre of the image and to the bride glancing out of the window.

Photographs of the couple sharing a moment together are often the hardest to get, the couple spend so much of the day apart chatting to family and friends and for some reason often don’t have many moments together.   All of the guests had been called through to the wedding breakfast and the couple had a couple of minutes alone together.  I’m sure they had completely forgotten I was there and I captured this lovely photograph of the two of them sharing a moment.  I have kept the lighting in the photograph warm to add to the lovely warm glow of the image.  In the wedding album this photograph sat on it’s own with plenty of space around it.

David Walliams was an usher at a celebrity wedding I photographed.  This was taken shortly after he arrived and was lit by light coming in through the doors into the porch of the church.  I don’t like my subjects to be camera aware, so try to work in a way that they largely ignore me.  The paparazzi turned up to this wedding, which presented an extra challenge.

Some photographs are taken as scene setters for use in the wedding album.  Everybody was sat eating in the marquee and missed this amazing sunset.  I never photograph people eating as it really isn’t flattering, there is plenty of time between the dinner courses to take photographs of people interacting. During dinner I often walk around looking for something that everybody else will miss.

Something I run into from time to time is restrictions on photography during the ceremony.  I went to meet the vicar with a friendly smile and introduce myself as the photographer. I was told on no account would any photographs be allowed in the church during the ceremony. The couple wanted photographs of the ceremony so I explained that I would stand at the back with a long lens, not use flash, not photograph during the prayers or vowels and that my camera is very quiet.  Unfortunately some vicars have had bad experiences with photographers and tend to think of us as all the same.  In this case the answer was still no to photography.  It’s frustrating to sit and watch the ceremony, all of those tender moments that would make a great photograph. I did as I was told until the point when the vicar announced the couple were married, everybody claps at this point and nobody noticed one small click from my camera.   My whole style of photography is about telling the story of the day, the ceremony is the whole reason for the wedding, so it’s a real shame when photographs are not allowed.

I arrived to photograph the bride getting ready and found this lovely scene up in an attic room.  I notice many photographers take a close up photograph of the bride having her lipstick applied, I wanted something that told more of the story than just a close up of the brides face.  The light was amazing in this room, flooding in through the window. By stepping back and including the whole scene the photographs tells a lot more about what is going on.  I used black & white to concentrate the eye on what is going on rather than the various colours in the scene (the walls are bright blue).

This photograph always reminds me of summer weddings.  Some of the guests came out of the marquee and  lit sparklers. Working by available light has resulted in the lovely warm glow.  I constantly watch for wedding guests doing something interesting to make a great photograph.

This was taken of the bride arriving for a wedding in Menorca. I love the reflection of shutters across the window of the car, which tell the viewer this wasn’t a wedding in the UK.  I used this photograph large in an 18″x12″ Queensberry album.

This is from a wedding I photographed in Scotland recently.  I had lots of nice photographs of people and of the couple, I wanted something that would show the location of the wedding on a private estate in Scotland.  The guests are walking to the marquee for dinner. The photograph has lots of lines leading your eye into the photograph and onto the hills in the background.  I love working in black & white as it almost distills the  photograph to it’s basic elements – composition, tones and shapes.

Wet weather. Nobody wants it to rain on their wedding day, but you have to make the most of it no matter what the British weather throws at you.  The question I get asked the most is what happens if it rains, the answer is you get great photographs.  Rain certainly doesn’t stop me from working and capturing some great moments.  I love the way the umbrellas frame the bride on this photograph.  I waited until I had a lovely expression on her face to capture this image in Windsor.

This was taken during the wedding breakfast.  I never photograph people eating as it doesn’t make an attractive photograph, but during the course people chat and relax which makes for great photographs.  I love the way the couple are having a private moment together despite being in a crowded room.  I have included arms in the foreground edges to show the photograph in context, otherwise the couple could be anywhere.  Photographs of the couple together are an important part of the coverage and I put a lot of effort into looking for moments like this.

This was a wedding at Thornton Manor in Cheshire. I took this during dinner when nothing much was going on.  From the back of the room I could see the couple framed through candelabras on the tables. I had to wait about ten minutes to get the expressions I wanted and the couple looking at each other.  In this case colour works in the photograph, this wouldn’t look right in black & white.

This was outside Badby church in Northamptonshire. I took this as a wide scene to show the story. In the wedding album this would sit on a page opposite close up photographs of the couple hugging friends and family.  When the couple come out of the church everybody comes to congratulate them, this is the point when some photographers might step in and start arranging people. I prefer to step back and capture all the lovely expressions.  I always take some family groups at every wedding, but prefer to arrange these at the reception when it’s a little more relaxed. This also allows me to fully concentrate on getting photographs like the one above.

I love making the most of available light, it’s an essential ingredient to a good photograph. In this case the light was pouring in through the window to backlight the brides veil as she walked downstairs to the wedding ceremony. The photograph also works well as part of the story telling, the previous page in the album showed the bride getting ready and the following page had photographs of the bride entering the ceremony room and the groom looking back over his shoulder watching the bride.

Arrival by boat.   Sophie and Tim had planned to arrive at their riverside wedding reception by boat, on the day the heavens opened as they left the church and in the back of my mind I was thinking there would be no way they would still use the  boat.  I rushed off to the wedding reception venue to eagerly await their arrival, clutching my umbrella to keep the rain off my camera lens. Much to my surprise Sophie and Tim braved the wet weather and arrived in the boat.  Ushers had crowded around with umbrellas, I positioned myself between them and waited for the boat to drift in. It was one of those moments when you really don’t know what you will get. As the boat came up against the dock the couple kissed, making this photograph complete.  The umbrellas frame the image and help draw your eye into the photograph.

Photographs of the couple together often seem to be the hardest to find, for some reason they seem to spend so much of the day apart.  I love this photograph of Jo and Doug from their wedding at Rushton Hall. I’m always looking out for moments like this during the wedding.

I rarely take photographs while everyone eats as it’s really not very flattering, it was during this time that I noticed the reflection on a glass door of this marquee in Yorkshire.  The wedding reception took place in the grounds of Harewood house, as the sun moved lower in the sky it bathed Harewood house in warm sunlight. I wanted to connect this with the wedding breakfast as part of the story of the day.

This is the sort of photograph I would use big on the left hand page of an album, the right hand side would have several photographs of the close up action as the couple greet their wedding guests before dinner.  Photographs like this are important to the story of the day.

This is often the time I see the groom looking very anxious as the music starts up and he waits for the bride.  When the groom looks at this photograph he will remember exactly how he felt at that moment.  I used a 50mm lens and a narrow depth of field to concentrate the viewers eye on the groom.  My heart always starts to beat faster at this point, I have to be totally on the ball to capture fleeting moments.

I like to include the overall scene in some of my photographs as well as more close up photographs showing expressions and emotion.  This was from a wedding at Jesus College in Cambridge, the bride and her father arriving.  I used black and white to lose all of the distracting colour elements in the photograph. I used the lines of the footpath to draw the viewers eye into the bride and her father.  A wide angle included the buildings in the background.

It’s the perfect excuse to share a few more of Natalie and Ben’s photographs from Kelmarsh Hall with you -