The story behind the photographs – part II

Another collection of my wedding photographs with a little background information.

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.

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