I knew when I gave up the rat race at 53 and moved from Winchester to Norfolk, that wedding photography was going to have to be my main source of income. I know many photographers avoid wedding photography like the plague, regarding it as either too stressful or formulaic. Luckily, I always enjoyed it. Yes - you are aware of the pressure of recording the most, or at least one of the, most important days of a couple's life but a lot less stresful than a 3.5 hour round trip commute into London, queuing on the M3 and M25 or having to put up with meetings 2PUs, AUSs having t
Keeping It Real !
The formulaic aspect was never an issue for me as I shot weddings in a purely documentary style - ie I photographed weddings as they really happened - no set-ups, nothing staged, nothing directed by me - I always tried to capture the laughter, the tears and the genuine emotions of each wedding day – authentically, naturally and honestly.
The section of the wedding I used to really love was just after the ceremony when the bride and groom were being congratulated by their friends and family. I used to stand close to the bride and groom and shoot as their guests an family came up and hugged them, kissed them etc. I'd be shooting them at a 24mm focal length and that's when you got the real emotion.
Well, apart from the odd request from the bride and groom for a particular staged shot - they were paying me after all.
The Bloody Group Shots !
And then, of course, the bloody group shots!
The ones that everybody hates being photographed in and which every wedding photographer I know, hates shooting!
I used to insist that couples kept it to no more than single figure different specified groups which I could shoot in 15 minutes. I used to ask that the couple nominate someone like one of the ushers to gather up the required family members and guests from a list I gave to them - even then it was always a nightmare.
In my 15 years as a wedding photographer, I only ever second-shot for another wedding photographer once - and he had to literally beg me (and pay me a lot of money!) He'd been booked to shoot a high-Anglican wedding including Holy Communion and the week before the wedding the couple had, at the last minute, hit him with a huge list of required group shots - that were going to take at least 90 minutes to get through. So he asked me if I would shoot documentary images of the family and guests in and around the church while he shot every combination of group shot possible.
In the end it took him over 2 hours by which time most of the guests had lost the will to live and disappeared off to the wedding breakfast venue! The bride did tell me that the huge list of group shots were requested at the behest of her parents - who were paying the bill, so she had no choice !
I would always persuade couples to restrict the number of prescribed images and group shots - even, on one occasion, turning down a wedding booking if they insisted!
I Enjoyed Shooting Weddings - Well, 99% of Them !
In the 15 years as a wedding photographer I shot over 200 weddings. In 2019, just before the pandemic, I decided to give it another couple of years before I stopped - so I cut down the number of hours I would shoot and raised my prices - and still got bookings.
Then the pandemic hit and it all came to a grinding halt. All the weddings I had booked for 2020 were postponed! That's when I had to pivot my photography business to concentrate much more on the book cover stock photography.
Over the next couple of years, when the world opened up again I decided to just shoot the weddings that were postponed duet to the pandemic and then call it a day - so in October 2023, at the ripe old age of 70, I photographed my last wedding!
I did quite well - there are not many wedding photographers still shooting weddings at 70! An awful lot, even the good and successful ones, give it up much earlier and concentrate on teaching others how to do it!
Odd Requests!
Yes - I had a few odd or funny requests. The bride who asked me to photograph her in her very sheer wedding lingerie after asking the videographer and the bridesmaids to leave the room! The videographer asked me later if that often happened to me - to which I replied "no not often". And another bride who asked me to photograph her actually putting her wedding lingerie on! It was a good thing that I am un-shockable"
Do I Miss It ? - and Would You Do One Now?
Do I miss it? Yes and no! Would you do another? No - I'd like to think I could still do it but having lost the last 10 weeks with a glandular fever flare-up and the accompanying exhaustion and total lack of energy I nearly said yes to a bride I had photographed for her model portfolio who asked me last year to photograph her wedding but with some reluctance I resisted the temptation.
I love documentary photography and I still miss the opportunity to photograph people at what is for 99.9% of them a happy day. So yes - I do miss shooting weddings, but I've turned down all requests to do weddings since giving up, mainly as I stopped paying for expensive professional indemnity and public liability insurance - just to make sure I wasn't tempted!
While I could still do the 8 hours of covering an all day wedding going from covering the bridal preparations onto the ceremony and then the reception venues I don't miss the recovery the day after - and to think think that some weekends I used to cover 2 or 3 one day after another - including the drive to and from venues in Cambridge! That's what was getting harder as I approached 70 years of age.
People forget that it isn't just the time photographing the actual wedding - they don't realise the 2 or 3 days of work after doing all the processing, etc.
Did I ever have a bad wedding? Well, only a couple. One where my patience was pushed by the bride's uncle who thought he was David Bailey and got in the way of a whole load of my shots - to the point I had to ask the groom to tell him to back off - he then had the temerity to blame me for stopping him! At least all the guests thought he was out of order.
The only other one was for an Afrikaner couple where the bride's sister booked me from Dubai - they wanted a whole load of ridiculous setup posed shots of them with their best man, ushers and bridesmaids. Something the bride's sister had neglected to tell me and I had had no opportunity to meet the couple beforehand (as they were flying in from South Africa for the wedding). Apparently, South African weddings are all about naff posed images!!!
I never really had a full-on "bridezilla" - only a couple of brides who attempted it.
I had to put up with one MOTB early on in 2009 who thought she knew best about the images for their album - the couple were fine but they had emigrated to Australia - easy to see why! In general I got on well with all my MOTBs even when they were taking it out on the DJs, reception owners, etc.
