Category Archives: Weddings

I loved this wedding!

Eleanor & Nick were married on a very wet and dark day in London at the uber cool Century Club in Soho. I’d already shot them for a pre wedding shoot in Shoreditch for their London Graffiti engagement shoot. So they kinda new what to expect with me and my photography.

However when it came to the time that we’d alloted for the couples portraits, it was absolutly bucketing it down. So we had to abandon the idea to shoot outside one of the Soho sex shops (Eleanor’s idea, not mine, but I was so up for that). Instead I just busted out the Off-Camera Flash.

Now you know I love my lighting and teaching others about this. So I jumped at the chance to really go for it and shoot in a few different locations around the club and totally experiment a bit. I’m super pleased with the images and feel that they don’t look like your typical wedding photography, which is always my end goal with my images.

We even ventured outside in the rain for a bit as we all wanted to capture a little bit of London and I almost got run over while running around the middle of a busy road trying to shoot though the bus drivers window.

So I hope you like the images and if you get me to shoot your wedding you can trust that if it does rain and it’s really dark, we’ll still get some stunning images of you guys.

If you want to see more of this amazing wedding check out the recent weddings gallery here and click this link for the Miami Vice themed photo booth (they met in Miami).

I think it’s really good to go back and look at your old work as a photographer.

We’re constantly progressing and moving on with our work, but it’s always good to look back and see where you have come from and also remind yourself of the ideas that you had back then.

I found this image from a wedding I shot back in 2008 in Dorset and I still really love it. I’d forgotten how cool this wedding was.

I can’t belive that Jack and Anna will have been married for five years this year.

How time flies.

Gooooooooooood Mooooooooorning Internet.

So it’s that Monday morning sneak peek from the weekends wedding time.

Today it’s a quick pick from the lovely Becky & Steve’s (aka Mr & Mrs Bean) wedding at Tottington Manor in Henfield, West Sussex. (Possibly one of the closest wedding venues that I’ve shot at).

I loved the fact that Becky had some strong ideas about the photography and we had also talked about using an umbrella (something i’m very fond of, as you may know….just check out the galleries) that Becky and Steve had at home. It was a big golfing rainbow brolly that I knew would make a very visual prop and I’d also spotted the daffodils in the car park on our pre wedding recce of the venue and had kept my fingers crossed that they would still be out at the wedding.

So here you go, one great couple, one big rainbow umbrella, a load of daffodils and the English weather playing ball and adding some colour to the sky.

I thank you.

So here is a sneak peek from this weekends fabulously fun SoHo Century Club wedding in London.

I’d been checking the weather religiously during the past week, as I’d planned to go for a walk with Eleanor and Nick around SoHo and we’d even scouted out a very cool sex shop to do some portraits outside of. Unfortunately it was raining cats and dogs (for non UK readers  that means it was raining heavily. No I don’t know why we say that either). So i’d scouted out a few different locations around the venue, which was the ultra cool Century Club (I want more weddings there please).

As some of you know, I teach other wedding photographers all about using flash and artificial lighting during weddings. Sometimes you just can’t rely on natural light, your faced with a very dark venue (in this case) or it’s a winter wedding. I love those situations as it forces me to be more creative and experiment more. So i’d noticed these curtains in the ceremony room, which was quickly converted back to a restaurant for the members, but after a bit of furniture moving, I had an area that I wanted to shoot in and could be used for two different set ups.

This was the second set up that I shot here, we had a massive laugh moving quickly around the venue and managed six different set ups inside (all using Off-Camera flash to light the shots) as well as venturing outside for some photography, where the stunning Eleanor stopped traffic, got a kiss from a Cockney cheeky chappy and I almost got run over shooting though a bus window…..but thats another story for another blog post.

So back to this shot. As I said i’d noticed these curtains and knew if I lit them with two different coloured gels from different sides, they would have quite a dramatic effect. We’d got quite a ‘safe’ shot in the bag here, so I thought i’d experiment a bit more and go for a more ‘fashion’ look here as I knew Eleanor’s dress (and Jimmy Choo wedding shoes) would look amazing in full length and Nick’s Savile Row wedding suit would also look incredibly dapper (i’d give him a 6/10 – private joke for those who heard the speeches). I love using red and blue gels….it’s kinda become my go to colour combination as I think it’s very dramatic and I don’t think that you’d look at these images and say they were wedding photo’s…..which is exactly what I aim for with my wedding photography.

So massive thanks to all the staff at the Century Club, SoHo, all the wedding guests for being a great laugh and a super huge congrats to two lovely lovely people on their marriage.

Oh and keep an eye out for the Miami Vice themed photo booth and if you want to see more of Eleanor and Nick check out their Shoreditch Street Art engagement shoot, by clicking the link.

I think that I may do a series of posts on why I love particular photos and my thinking behind them. Not sure why, I just think that there are things that I want to share about the images that I don’t really get to say.

So for no particular reason, i’m gonna start off with this photo of Paul singing at his Mod Wedding in the Costwolds. Paul married the lovely Nikki in a really stylish Mod Wedding at Cripps Barn, Gloucestershire that was such fun to be at and had some really nice touches. If you want to see more of their wedding click this link: Mod Wedding.

Anyway, back to the photo. Paul & Nikki decided not to have a first dance and instead Paul had put together a band with his best men and ushers and close friends and were going to play three songs to start the evening off with.

I knew something special was going to happen, I just didn’t know how cool it would be. So taking the Mod Wedding theme and using that as an influence for how I thought i’d light the shots, I used three flashes, one with a red gel, one with a blue gel (facing the guests) and one with no gel, which provided white light. The thinking being that I’d use the classic red, white and blue colours of the Mod target logo to do something different for these shots. (The house lights really weren’t working for me and just made everything look a little flat and dull.)

Then the band started to play. Those first cords still send shivers down my spine. Paul grew about two feet in stature and seemed to be channeling every Mod and indie band front man into his performance. I could see Paul Weller, Noel Gallager, Ian Brown, Tim Burgess and even a little Mick Jagger there. It was like he was a man possessed (in a good way though). You could just tell that this was going to be one of those moments that Paul will be telling his kids, grandkids and probably anyone who would listen about that time that he sung at his wedding. It was one of those ‘life moments’. I could tell that Paul was loving every second of it. He was singing to all his friends and family, all the people in the world that he loved the most and was determined to squeeze every last drop of pleasure out of it.

It was a real joy to be able to share that with Nikki and Paul and to be able to capture that moment for them. I even went back and created a Spotify play list based on the music played at their wedding and am currently listening to Sproston Green by The Charlatans, which was the first song that they played. You can listen to the Brit Mod Spotify playlist by clicking the link.

Keep your eyes peeled for more behind the scene posts……