Documentary wedding photography at Marble Hill House

The marriage of Susie Kirkham and Dan Higgs at Marble Hill House, Twickenham, and wedding reception at The Park Hotel, Teddington.

Wedding photography: what’s it all about then?

Whilst editing Susie and Dan’s wedding I’ve been thinking about the service we provide as wedding photographers and why people hire us for their special day. Let me explain a little… Not so very long ago Susie and Dan asked me to photograph their wedding for them. This was quite a late booking for me, so we arranged a little meeting a few weeks before the big day to chat about what they wanted. Like most couples that come to me, Susie and Dan told me they’re not comfortable in front of a camera, and that they hate having their picture taken – but they wanted something really special as a recording of their day. Their criteria?

• “No formal photos at all”…
• “We can’t pose”…
• “We don’t want the photography to be intrusive”…
• “We want natural pictures of friends and family enjoying themselves, not looking uncomfortable in front of the camera”…
• “We want it to reflect the celebration, the party atmosphere”.

OK, we can do that.

Looking after their guests in fine style, Susie and Dan had arranged a vintage routemaster bus to transport everyone to and from the wedding ceremony, so let’s start with a few pictures of that:

The venue for the wedding itself was Marble Hill House, and although the ceremony room is not the biggest room in the world it has some lovely rich colouring and beautiful light coming in from the windows, allowing us to create gorgeous candid photos as we wait for our bride to enter…

Susie entered, looking radiant…

Back to my original musing: as wedding photographers, I think sometimes we may forget exactly what people want when they book us to shoot their wedding day. We love to be creative, we love to produce those “Wow” shots to really blow you away, and we love to be just a little bit edgy when we get the chance, ever trying to produce something different, and better than we’ve done before. And all that’s great… but I wonder if sometimes perhaps we forget what’s really most important. What’s that? Well I think it’s you. It’s the people that come to the wedding, the family and friends, and the relationships, love and laughter between them that contribute to the celebration of marriage. It seems to me that more and more people are asking me for natural, informal wedding photography really showing their friends and family enjoying their day… so we’re going to show a bit more of this in our blog posts from now on.

Of course, we’re still looking to produce the really creative and special pictures we love to post too – but we’re just going to change the emphasis just a little to show a bit more of the ‘real wedding day’ photos and natural moments you’ll want to enjoy again and again. Like this one – a very quick grab-shot of our newlyweds exiting right after the ceremony:

Not entirely sure what Dan’s buddies are implying here…

With lots of kids at the wedding, Susie and Dan asked us to make sure we got plenty of pictures of them… and with kids being such great subject to photograph anyway, that was no problem. These two were very cute, sharing a spot of lunch:

Got to get every last drop out of that drink carton…

Now, there’s a quite long and convoluted story behind this next picture which I won’t go into here… but suffice to say that it’ll be remembered…(!)

Seriously though, these guys can’t be sensible for more than two minutes…

Susie and Dan: congratulations! I know you had an absolute blast on your wedding day and I hope the photos go some way to showing what a great time everybody had. Karen and I really enjoyed meeting everyone and laughing along with all of you, so thanks for having us.

Rob.

Documentary wedding photography at Marble Hill House in Twickenham, Middlesex