Weddings in 2023
Weddings in 2023 – a busy few months
The way wedding bookings fell for me in 2023 was rather intense. Over 90% were over just four months – it was a full-on period of shooting, processing, and delivering while managing a new addition to our family (see the end of this post). 2024 weddings are a bit more spread out across the year so far.
While the bulk of the weddings were in Sussex and London, there were also weddings in Devon, Cheshire, Rutland, and Suffolk. From Country estates to village halls, a tiny, ancient chapel to grand University buildings. Plus two of the best looking, and very old, churches in Sussex. One wedding was just one-hour coverage, with just four people at my local Registry office. Another was 200 people in a massive marquee in open countryside. Three weddings featured previous couples as guests, as their friends hired me on the back of what they saw captured from those weddings. And then there was the unique duck herding entertainment…
Some warm days but not the stifling heat of 2022. But also a fair few wet days. There were wedding venues I had never been to before – Old Luxters Barn, Barnett Hill Hotel, and Brookfield Barn. Some venues I was there in 2022, some it had been over ten years since I last shot a wedding there. As I write this, 2024 will see me back at Cissbury Barns, Slaugham Place, Langshott Manor, The Waterside Inn, Queens’ College, Ridge Farm, Slindon House, and Highley Manor, amongst others. Plus several new venues, including the Roman Baths in Bath.
But enough waffle from me, it’s images that matter, so here are a few images from weddings in 2023…
A month in Florence, Italy
On a personal note, as I mentioned at the end of the year review of 2022 it was the year when we suddenly lost our family dog, after 10+ years. So we decided to take some time out in the winter, and do something you can’t easily do when you have a dog. We went to live in Florence (Firenze) for a month. My wife and I rented an Airbnb apartment near the Duomo. (The sixth picture below, of the Duomo, was taken from outside the front door of our one-room apartment.) Bit of a gamble work-wise, but February doesn’t tend to be a busy month for me. I did miss out on a few jobs but managed to book in others while I was in Italy. My wife is a writer, so she was able to work there, while I had the luxury of roaming the streets of Florence during the day and getting to see all the art and history there that I could. My only other time there was when I was a student. I had taken a bike out to Greece. After cycling around the Peloponnese, visiting sites such as Delphi, Corinth, Epidaurus, Mycenae, and Olympia, I took a ferry and a train to Rome. From there I cycled up through Italy and then from the bottom of France, up to the port of Dieppe, where I fell off the bike…front wheel lodged in a tram track. I almost got arrested cycling on an Italian motorway…
En route I had spent a couple of days in Florence – visited the Uffizi, the Bargello, and the Accademia with Michelangelo’s David, etc – in a bit of a rush. But so much I failed to see. A chance to have the time to get to know the city, even if out of season, and tick off more famous art. I visited the Uffizi art gallery eight times on this trip – although out of season, it was still very busy. Even with all this time, some sites were tricky or impossible to see. For example, Giotto’s Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce was covered in scaffolding. Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library was closed. But some places I had read about during my Art History degree, key artworks, like the Banucci Chapel were accessible.
We also visited places outside of Florence. Weekend trips by bus or train, to Fiesole, Lucca, San Girmagino, Siena, and a walk along the Cinque Terre. The trip was also a chance to shoot with different camera equipment. For weddings, I shoot with Sony A9II cameras and fast Sony/Zeiss primes. On this trip, I took my Leica SL2-S cameras with small Leica M rangefinder lenses. Beautiful, small, lightweight manual focus lenses. I took 18mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm, and 90mm with me. Mixing it around which I took out each day. Maybe just one, maybe three or four. The 28 or the 35, the 75 or the 90, or just the 50. When I was here as a student it was just an Olympus OM10, a couple of lenses, and a few rolls of film – some of which were destroyed by the persistent rain I would encounter in France on that cycling trip. So far I’ve sold 25 images from this trip to Florence via a picture stock library. But the way stock photographs are sold now (cheap, thanks to Getty) is not enough to retire on…
On the street, Florence was pretty quiet. In the evenings it was pretty cold and although busy in places, there wasn’t a buzz of people. But I was concentrating on the art and the history.
Here are a few images…
New Boy – Chester
Mid-May, we found ourselves getting up early one Sunday morning to drive to Nottinghamshire. We had seen a dog online and signed up to adopt him. To say that life has been chaos ever since would be an understatement. But we are getting there with him. So this is Chester (We kept the name the rescue charity had given him, he’d had at least three names in less than a year. He had already had two brief, failed adoptions in the UK). He was a stray in a village in North Macedonia. That being a land-locked country, Sussex gave him his first visit to a beach. He’s big, and clumsy but very friendly – just needs lots and lots of training…and then a lot more…notable destruction so far, is much of one sofa, an iPhone, several books, a car fob, several plates/cups and the back garden.
