Jersey Summer Destination Wedding

or Wearing Two Hats at a Wedding

I would like to make it clear at the outset that I was not actually wearing two hats. To be honest with you I wasn’t even wearing one hat. I tend to find that the snap brim of a good trilby and certainly the wider brim of a fedora gets in the way when you’re bringing the camera up to your eye. What I mean to say is I was both photographer and guest at this wedding–the two hats being figurative rather than literal. I realise that I will have lost 70% of the readership with this bombshell, but the rest of you, I hope, will soldier on.

I know some wedding photographers prefer to be one or the other, guest or photographer and I know some couples would rather have their wedding photographer friend relax and enjoy the wedding, stress-free, without having to worry about also taking the photos. Certainly when I started out I found the split tricky to navigate. How relaxed can you allow yourself to be? How chatty? How focused on the job at hand? But as I’ve gone on and shot more and more weddings for friends I’ve actually found them to be some of the most enjoyable weddings to shoot. Partly this is because if I’m not photographing the wedding it’s hard to stand down and not at least look for the photo–I think wedding days for my brain are now one big neural highway. But it’s also a joy to be around people you know and are therefore more attuned to the quirks and nuances of the personalities and family dynamics. Now admittedly this was a pretty big wedding and I still only knew around a dozen people there, but I knew the bride and groom and the groom’s family very well, which means you’re at the centre and can see the tendrils of all the other relationships branching off, connecting everyone. These things can be worked out at weddings where you know no one, of course, but when you are familiar with the faces you’re kind of fast-tracked through all this.

But the bottom line of course is I enjoy my job enormously and it’s a pleasure to be able to deliver photos for people you’re close to. Marcus and Lexi are palpably very much in love and both of them have big personalities and wonderfully expressive faces. Lexi, particularly, looking stunning in her Paloma Blanca wedding dress, has a brilliant way of appearing to have just been told a dirty joke for the first time ever every time someone says something into her ear. There was a hell of a lot of laughter and a hell of a lot of phone. Shoes came off, table settings were destroyed, sunglasses were worn on the dance floor and someone, apparently, ended up sleeping rough nearby. Enjoy..