Weddings At The Forever Moment

Ah, weddings!

I photographed many things and in many genres over a period of twenty years before I accepted an approach from a work colleague to photograph her sister's wedding. And once I'd done it, I'd found my niche. Mind you, it was an easy introduction - a couple with very relaxed expectations ("We don't want any posed photos, and we don't want any group photos - we just want you to capture the story of the day."), a modern church designed to capture beautiful soft light, and a priest who gave me a very simple brief - "Do what you need to do, and don't be a nuisance." And a day of unbroken sunshine.



Not all weddings since that first one have been the same. In fact, what I learnt very quickly is to treat every wedding as totally unique - a necessary mindset, because it follows from that that every couple is unique too.

Every job brings its own challenges - in fact, a wedding day usually becomes a series of problem-solving exercises, and the problems need to be solved on the fly. With a smile on your face.




For those early weddings, I went through an evolution:

First wedding: very keyed-up, trying to remember all the technical stuff so that I could produce good photos irrespective of the lighting conditions.

After five weddings: getting the hang of this now, dealt with a variety of locations and lighting, feeling more confident. Soon be at my peak.

After ten weddings: hang on - it seems that the more experience I get, the more I find out that I've still got a helluvalot to learn.



And so it is - no wedding photographer on the planet is ever going to know everything. All of us face new challenges at every wedding we do. All we can do is learn to recognise those challenges and develop a repertoire of techniques and coping strategies - building on experience and investing in ongoing personal development. And learn to do this with a smile.

I've also learned that wedding photography is much, much more than about taking the photos on the day. In this digital age, there's the culling and post-production process to produce the end result. As a rough rule of thumb, for an hour spent taking photos at a wedding, there's going to be four or five hours spent in front of a computer, getting the photos ready to be put before my customers.



Then there's the time spent actually getting the work in - defining my market, devising ways to get my name in front of that market, responding to leads and the dark, cold and damp evenings from November to February going to see potential customers. Writing up contracts, remembering to send invoices, the final pre-wedding meetings nailing down timings and details, - I want my customers to have a perfect wedding day, and I want my contribution to meld seamlessly into that perfection. Well, it's an aspiration......


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There is, I think, a simple reason why I'm in love with wedding photography - it's to do with the way my brain's wired. As I understand it, our brain is divided into two halves: there's the left side, which deals with order, structure, numbers, and logic. It's the thinking side, and it swoons when confronted with a spreadsheet. In the context of wedding photography, it's the business side.

The right side is hippy central - it's about colour, shapes, music, emotion - it's arty and thinks chaos is cool and is why we get struck dumb when we see things like the Itchen Navigation between Shawford and Eastleigh from a train, just after daybreak on an autumn morning. For the wedding photographer, it's the part of the brain that decides when a photo is just right.

Many, many years ago, I underwent a battery of tests in connection with my application for promotion into an accountancy job. One of the objectives of those tests was to see whether my brain was left- or right-side dominant. The answer was that I was neither. Put a column of figures in front of me, ask me to write a to-do list, and I'm as happy as a pig in muck. Let me hear an Aretha Franklin song, and (depending on the circumstances) I might shed a tear at the sheer beauty of her voice. So, yes I could be an accountant, but yes, I could also be an artist. So.....here I am, more than forty years later - a wedding photographer, with all that that entails. And I'm at peace with that. 


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About time we cut to the chase.... your wedding and how much do I charge?

It's a simple pricing structure, and you have a fundamental choice: do you want full day coverage, of more than seven hours? Or do you want shorter coverage, maybe two or three hours?

For a full day, with hours to be agreed between the parties but covering the key moments - it's £500.

On an hourly basis, it's £70 per hour - but there is a minimum booking period of two hours.

What does that buy? 

Digital photos - no watermarks, and unrestricted personal usage rights (commercial usage isn't covered, so we'll need to chat if that situation arises).

Irrespective of the length of the booking, the photos are supplied as follows:
  • the day after the wedding, a minimum of 20 photos are placed in a password-protected online gallery. These can be shared, downloaded, placed on social media, etc. Because these are relatively small, low-resolution files, they're not suitable for printing.
  • within a month, the completed collection is delivered on a personalised keepsake USB drive, in both high and low-resolution. These can be used in any (non-commercial) way you see fit - print and share to your heart's content. At the same time, low-resolution versions of the same photos are uploaded to an online gallery, so they can be shared with family and friends.

The prices don't include any printed materials - loose prints, canvasses,  photobooks or albums. I can supply them, at competitive prices, but you can choose to make your own arrangements, using the high-resolution, print-ready files on the USB stick. To give you an idea of prices, the photobooks and albums that I supply range from £125 to £445 - the exact price depends on your specification, because they're custom-designed to customers's requirements. I strongly advise that you wait until you've seen the photos before committing yourself to buying them.



Hope that's given you enough information about me and the service I offer. If you're interested but not committed, there's nothing wrong with meeting up for an informal, no obligation chat - you just have to ask!




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