And no we didn’t arrange it neatly like that.  We just took it as a good omen, took the picture and went inside :)

Yes, the first reading at Saturday’s wedding was indeed John Cooper Clarke’s “I Wanna Be Yours”, which we’ve heard many times before  but never seen delivered with such panache.  In case you’re not familiar with it yourself, the first verse goes …

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
If you like your coffee hot
let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots
I wanna be yours

We’re overdue for another “How To Be A Wedding Photographer” post and there is one on the way now, but meanwhile here’s a novel use for white kitchen cabinet doors …

So presumably nobody from whoever first wrote those words on a piece of paper to the bloke who screwed it on that door years ago thought “Here, hang on a minute”?  Whatever, at least it makes a change from saying he’s going to be prosecuted …

This was a new one on us though – the groom being wheeled into the ceremony room at Pennyhill Park by the celebrant, the lovely Claire Turner from Weybridge Register Office.  Claire and her colleague (whose name escaped me) really were a pleasure to work with, and are a fine example of the registrars who are at the opposite end of the scale to the star of  this post

More pictures from Julia and Dan’s wedding coming soon – hopefully Thursday morning!

and here comes the bridal cab on its first run with the bridesmaids …

before the bus turns up and parks wrong way round, meaning the guests alight into the traffic …

under the watchful eye of the digger driver

who has got his digger onto the trailer ready to call it a day by the time the bus is turned round, the confetti is thrown and the happy couple depart in the cab …

That’s Pete of Engage Wedding Video with his trademark Steadicam rig filming Philippa Pippendeker doing a little piece to camera before the main players arrive, while his number two does a little pondering to himself.

Philippa was there to do interviews with the guests for Wedding TV and vox pops for the wedding video.

After a ceremony during which no photography was allowed, bride and bridegroom were treated to the full-on multimedia experience during the recession.  There’s a couple of seconds between this shot of Pete doing the backwards walk (above) and the one below for which I closed up to him while we both backed past Maria, who’s there on the right lining up for the supporting cast to come past her.

So, after 9 years and nearly 400 weddings of our own, we finally got a camera crane at a reception!  There’s at least £25K-worth of very high-tech carbon fibre and electronics in that one piece of kit, driven by a very skilled operator who managed to keep it clear of both the top of the cake and the table centrepieces.  Not pictured here are the two guys who were shooting HD video segments at the reception to add to the footage shot on the ordinary video cameras.

It wasn’t a huge wedding (160 guests), so we were fascinated to see how three stills, three regular video and two HD video people could actually work together at a gig like this, although that obviously depended on both the couple and their guests being up for it – which they certainly were on Saturday.

Given that our own clients very rarely engage a videographer, it was a most interesting wedding and our thanks go to Maria for giving us a go on it. In addition to enjoying ourselves hugely we also got plenty of cool shots, a few of which I hope to be able to blog in due course.

and this is the scene in the room in the Hilton Manchester where Khera’s half an hour  away from leaving for the church.  At this very moment the man she’s about to marry is ten miles away,  in a newsagent’s shop just round the corner from the church, where he’s gone with some of the  blokes to buy a couple of bottles of water.

As he fishes in his trouser pocket for some change, Sean realises that the vents of his new suit jacket are still tacked together.  Luckily, the newsagent is not at all fazed when one of the seven men in suits now filling his shop asks if he has a knife handy, so what you see here is in fact the best man applying the blunt blade of a Stanley knife to the stitching on the back of the bridegroom’s rather expensive jacket …

This is in the same church as The Holy Keg, and in answer to your question, I have no idea what “anti-stick” is and why the slots are regularly cleaned with it …