Your wedding photography does not start on the big day itself. Many photographers think having a good camera and knowing all about the technicalities is key. Those are essentials, but getting good pictures of people is more about creating a rapport with them, and so right from the first meeting you need to feel at ease with us and have confidence in us.
Once we are booked we will invite you to make a date for a pre-wedding portrait shoot. This can be anytime before the wedding but usually is within a couple of months of the big day. These shoots are just a bit of fun and enable us to get to know each other better. They usually take place in the New Forest, down at the beach, or anywhere else we mutually agree on. Yes, you can bring the dog or the children if you have any! Part of the meeting is given over to going over the planning for the wedding itself.
The pre-wedding shoot really does make the pictures of the wedding better. This is because on the wedding day itself you will feel familiar and at ease with us being around.
The wedding day varies enormously depending on your plans. You make the plans and we tell the story. But the following is a rough guide to what we might do at a 'typical' wedding.
Jim will meet the Bride getting ready. Almost nothing to be posed - just storytelling pictures.
Often Nicky will meet the Groom and Ushers, possibly in the pub! Again - just capturing the atmosphere.
We will then capture pictures of the guests arriving and photograph the ceremony. This is done very unobtrusively - we never use flash and make almost no noise, whether church or civil ceremony.
Immediately following is a great time for reportage photography of the couple meeting all the gusts, hugs, kisses and confetti.
Once at the reception the time will fly, but Jim and Nicky will be busy capturing the guests enjoying themselves and also arrange to shoot any family groups you may want. If kept to a minimum these can be great fun and we always encourage the guests to join in and get their own pictures.
This may be a good time for us to get away from the crowd for ten minutes to get some relaxed pictures of the couple together - though we do sometimes leave this until later in the evening.
We can photograph the speeches - a great opportunity to get candid reaction shots of the audience! Following the wedding breakfast, depending on the light, can be a lovely time to get some romantic evening portraits. If it is a bright sunny day the harshness will have gone from the sun and a soft glow will be available to shoot by.
The first dance and a few pictures of grandma letting her hair down on the dance floor could round off the photography day.
The editing of the pictures is a job that usually takes at least as long as photographing the wedding itself. This is where we do put a lot of effort into your pictures, and unlike some photographers do not just burn all the pictures to a disc straight from the camera.
Once the edit is finished we will upload the pictures to an online gallery, and then put all the images onto a memory stick for you to keep. The pictures are all full-size files and all properly cropped, colour-corrected, and ready for print.
Of course we would love to make an album for you too, and we have several options for these.