Blogposts
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Word of Mouth
Word of Mouth – HOW ONE BOOKING LEADS TO ANOTHER Word-of-mouth recommendations that lead to bookings. Wedding bookings/enquiries would need a whole blog post. Some enquiries are bizarre. Some enquiries just get this way of capturing a wedding and book immediately upon checking on my availability. The more creative the couple – I shoot many weddings for photographers, filmmakers, art directors, etc – the more straightforward the booking is. No need for video chats with no real questions. Or no questions like “what do you wear at a wedding?”, “what are those out-of-focus bits in your pictures?”. Word of mouth…
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Wedding Entertainment
Wedding entertainment Wedding entertainment, by which I mean making the drinks reception bit more special for the wedding guests. So I am not talking about the Band, the DJ, the photo booths, or even the fireworks, all that is the evening stuff but what can happen in the afternoon. With the ceremony complete, for most weddings it is then about ninety minutes of drinks and canapes, sometimes more. As a wedding photographer, it is a time to look to capture the characters, the atmosphere, the interactions and the emotions as the wedding couple attempt to meet all their guests before…
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IPhones, iPads and cameras
A few months ago I had an old client get in touch about their image files from their wedding in 2003. Having found the set of images, I ran through them, tweaking the files as much as you can with files from 2003 (Nikon D1X wedding photography). This was still the early days of digital photography. What people wore, and their haircuts, were not that dramatically different from today but one thing struck me as being different to weddings today – no wedding guests clutching iPhones! Of course, the iPhone had not been invented in 2003. The first iPhones came…
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Dark Wedding Venues
Dark wedding venues – working with the light Dark wedding venues is the title of this post and how the light at venues affects the resulting wedding photography. Not every wedding venue has perfect light. This may be due to the layout of the venue, the lighting, the weather, and the time of year, there are many factors. Reportage or documentary wedding photography is primarily about storytelling. So the moments are key. Particular moments that happen during the day, both seen and unseen by the wedding couple. But also the emotions, the characters, and the atmosphere. The lighting is a…
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Highley Manor | Rhys & Chris
Highley Manor wedding photography Highley Manor is a wedding venue that sits just near the Sussex village of Balcombe and a few miles south of Crawley. Not far from where the M23 becomes the A23 and the road heads on south to Brighton. Once the home of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, although that particular building was demolished and the present one built in the late nineteenth century. A local wedding venue for me, just a few miles from my house, but one I had not shot at for twenty years until the wedding day for Rhys and Chris. It…
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Bosham Church wedding | Ellen & Oliver
Bosham Church wedding Bosham church sits close to the quay in the small Sussex village near Chichester. Holy Trinity church, surrounded by flint walls, is considered the oldest place of worship in Sussex. This Grade I listed building sits on Saxon foundations, in turn, that may sit on the remains of a Roman Basilica. The Roman Palace at Fishbourne is just up the road. Certainly, the Romans were nearby. An enormous sculpted marble head, known as ‘the Bosham Head’, much eroded and weighing 170kg was found in a local garden in 1800. It is now thought this could have been…
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Weddings in 2024
Weddings in 2024 – May to December Weddings in 2024 started in May for me, with a small wedding at the Waterside Inn in Berkshire and ended in December in Kent, in some very wintry weather. In between I also captured weddings in Sussex, Surrey, Suffolk, London, Cambridge, Bath and Shropshire. More on that Shropshire wedding in a bit, as there was something very unique about that particular job for me. Weddings varied in size and expense. Small intimate weddings in a restaurant to super large marquees in sunlit fields. I think the amount spent on fine cigars at one…
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Cheswardine wedding | Caroline & Simon
Cheswardine wedding A Cheswardine wedding, a small village near the Shropshire/Staffordshire border. Just north of Newport and south of Market Drayton, the Shropshire Union Canal passes nearby. Now with all due respect, I doubt that most of the UK population has ever heard of Cheswardine, but when Caroline emailed me in March, the name popped out for me, for a particular reason. With all the weddings I’ve shot, 1000+ now, this is the first church that has a family connection for me. St Swithun’s church, on a small hilltop, overlooking the village High Street is where my Great, Great, Great,…