The second useful thing is this: most of your wedding day is not spent in front of a camera being asked to pose. The ceremony happens. The confetti happens. Your dad gets emotional during the speeches. Your friend from university does something ridiculous on the dance floor. All of that gets photographed without you being aware of it. For most of the day, if your photographer is any good, you will forget they are there.

That’s not posing. That’s documentary. Half of my job is to disappear.
The other half is to not disappear.

Here is where the industry has told you a slightly dishonest story. There is a current fashion for photographers to describe themselves as purely documentary, as if portraits are something a lesser kind of photographer resorts to. They aren’t. They’re part of a good gallery. Standing with your new husband or wife somewhere lovely for ten minutes, being lightly directed, and ending up with a photograph you’d put on your wall, is a thing worth doing. You will not get there by accident. Nobody wanders into a great portrait..

You will not love every photo. Nobody does. You will love a lot of them. There will be ones where you think your face is doing something strange, and you will show them to your partner and your partner will say “that’s just what your face does.” That is also normal.

Your photos won’t look like a glossy magazine. They will look like you. On a really good day, in good light, with the person you just married, wearing something you spent months choosing. That is a pretty high bar even without being retouched into someone else.

What working together looks like, if any of this sounds like you.

I don’t do a hard sell and I don’t do discovery calls. If you’ve read this far and you want to talk about your wedding, email me or fill in the contact form. I’ll reply with honest answers to whatever you want to know. If you’d like to meet or have a video call before deciding, we can. If you’d rather do it all over email, that works too. There’s no script.

If you want to feel out whether being photographed by me is actually bearable before committing to the wedding day, a pre-wedding shoot is the simplest way. An hour or two walking around somewhere in Cambridge. No pressure. You’ll know by the end whether you want me there on the day.

You’ll also, usefully, have one less thing to worry about. Once you’ve seen the photos from a pre-wedding shoot and realised you look like yourself in them, the fear of looking awkward in your wedding photos tends to quietly go away. You’ll find something else to worry about. There’s always something else. But it won’t be this.