2012 in five images

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A brief review of my year in wedding photography, limited to just five images…..

I’ve decided to pick just five photographs I haven’t used in this blog or on my website before, converted to black and white, to sum up my photographic year as a documentary wedding photography. This wasn’t a particularly easy exercise, but here are the results and I hope you enjoy looking at them.

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The first is from a Norwich wedding in April. This was in the church before the main wedding service itself, well before the bride’s arrival. The wedding was a fusion of a Zimbabwean and a British wedding – here some of the guests are clearly enjoying themselves quite uninhibitedly, though the small boy isn’t quite sure what to make of it

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The second is also from April, at the reception in St Andrew’s Hall in Norwich. I think it was the lovely interaction between the two women that appealed to me about this image, with the way their arms are linked together in the same angled shape.

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The third is from a June wedding at The Old Rectory, Great Melton near Norwich – one of the bridesmaids is having her hair done while another bridesmaid waits, reflected in the mirror. This is a beautiful country house venue, though apart from bridal preparations much of my time was spent outside, dodging the summer showers while photographing a woodland wedding.

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The fourth is an image from a wedding in Florence in June. I just happened to be outside the beautiful Chiesa Di San Miniato Del Monte overlooking the city when the wedding party spilled out of the church after their ceremony, so I merged with the crowds and took some documentary shots: here I captured some of the interactions between guests while the couple were posing for photographs in the background.

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Finally the fifth image is also from Florence, and taken on the iconic Ponte Vecchio while a couple walked up and down being photographed – I just took advantage of the circumstances and took some pictures. It’s a pleasant combination of bride and groom and (separated from them) a number of passers by.

Image of the month 11

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IMG_4774_bw600For this month’s image, I’ve gone back to look at some pictures I took at a family wedding back in September 2009. This was in the evening, with some of the bride’s family getting together and making music. Something appealed to me about the balance of the composition, the fact that everyone is looking in a different direction, concentrating on the musical instruments, the mundane details of glasses and bottles. It’s understated, and yet captures the feeling of the moment.

The ‘Societies’ Convention 2013

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IMG_4143_bw600I’ve been busy working on my website the last week or so, and I had meant to post something about The ‘Societies’ Convention, but I’ve only just found the time…..

It was the first time I’d been to anything quite like this – in all, it was several days of seminars and workshops and a trade show – I made it down to London (the Hilton Hotel and Convention Centre, Edgware Road) for the whole of Saturday December the 12th. After an overnight stay in Covent Garden on Friday, I was at the venue at the unearthly hour of 8.00 for a seminar with Kevin Mullins (as it turned out, the high spot of my day). I then flitted to and from several other seminars throughout the day, grabbed a quick sandwich lunch, and spent a couple of hours wandering around the trade show – spread over several floors.

I did find it useful to see and talk with a number of suppliers I would like to consider using in future, particularly for insurance, management, website hosting and albums and similar products. I picked up plenty of brochures and a few free photography magazines, which can’t be bad. All in all it’s something I would consider doing again, but it did give me a useful insight from mingling with other photographers and looking through the trade stands.

Image of the month 10

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When thinking about what I was going to use for this month’s featured image, I made the decision to go back and look through images from a wedding photoshoot in Norwich in April, and look through some images for something I hadn’t really noticed first time through.

This is a shot of the bridesmaids together in the church before the beginning of the wedding service. I did crop it somewhat to bring out the focus on the small group as the key element of the picture, and decided to keep it in colour after looking at black and white conversions as I felt the purple dresses stood out really well.

I decided that what I liked about this picture was the relaxed and happy attitude of the bridesmaids and the range of their expressions – the two on the left looking towards the camera, the other two looking at each other; along with the clasped hands and (technically) the placement of the subjects on a slight diagonal. It’s a simple and straightforward image, of course, but one that I felt deserved a second look.

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Brides and grooms in Paris

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On a trip to Paris last week, I kept coming across brides and grooms with their photographers and assistants posing for shots against typical Parisian backdrops. As one does. Naturally I had a camera to hand and managed a few shots of my own. Whether they were actually married in Paris, or just taking the opportunity of a classy photoshoot, I never managed to ask. Does Paris hold a particular appeal for those from the Far East? There’s no doubt that Tour Eiffel is a pretty spectacular background for anyone’s wedding photographs, though wandering around the Place du Tetre in Montmatre mingling with the tourists is a very different kettle of fish. Whichever way you look at it, there’s something romantic about Paris and its appeal never fades.

Putting details in context

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When it comes to photographing weddings, I’m a big believer in getting those detail shots in such a way that their context is clear. On its own, a picture of flowers, table decorations, place cards, shoes or whatever isn’t going to have anything like the same emotional resonance as a picture that relates the detail to people, or at least something that shows it’s clearly taken at a wedding.

As an illustration, here’s a picture I took at a wedding earlier this year in Norwich. It’s in a church, it looks like a wedding, the people are obviously concentrating on what’s being said, but the focus is clearly on the coloured ribbons in centre shot, and that’s exactly what I had intended. I like other elements of the composition – the strong curve of the wooden railing linking the people together and drawing the eye to the centre of the frame, but for me the main thing here is to establish the context of the decorative details.

A Cambridge photoshoot

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Browsing through some photographs I took in Cambridge a couple of years ago, I came across some great black and white conversions – I’d forgotten how much I liked these at the time. There are shots of people and objects, mainly in and around Magdalen Bridge and King’s College.

The one I’ve chosen to reproduce here is one of my favourites, and could easily pass for a shot of a classic French bridal car at a wedding, especially parked as it was near King’s College. I never did discover who the owners were or what they were doing in Cambridge (and as I recall, they were given a parking ticket by a zealous traffic warden).

Image of the month 2

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In Valencia, as I discovered last June, it’s very much the done thing for newly married couples to have a photoshoot walking around the city centre – and as it’s such a beautiful city I can understand why. Over the space of a couple of days I saw two couples wandering around with a photographer rushing ahead of them or posing them in front of a fountain to get the desired shot.

The image I’ve chosen has the couple centre frame, walking along one of the main shopping streets, with the bride looking in my direction, and both of them beaming, but I really picked this one because of the woman in front of them, totally unaware, and the man behind them glancing in their direction. I chose a black and white conversion as in colour the clothes of the two others distracted attention away from the bride and groom.