Here’s a few pictures from Lucie and Ross’s wedding at the Andaz Liverpool Street, a really cool venue but one that’s certainly challenging for a wedding photographer!

Lucie wore a gorgeous Candy Anthony dress with colour-matched Louboutins, bridesmaids’ dresses were from Vivien of Holloway, and family friend the Revd Dr Michael Bunce officiated at a ceremony held in the lowest light level we’ve experienced in 10 years and 400 or so weddings.

Straight afterwards, we headed outside for a quick go on the station concourse while the guests made a start on the champagne and canapés, before eventually moving into a room lit by an interesting mix of purple and green light for the speeches and meal.

There was one set-up shot which Lucie particularly wanted after the meal, but by then we were totally snookered for light in the only possible setting for that picture.  And yes, we are talking indoors.  Luckily we had a very obliging restaurant manager on duty, who kindly took Ann and me on a high-speed tour of (literally) the bright lights of the Andaz until we found a spot suitable for some alternative pictures.  That explains why we ended up shooting with a kitchen range and some rather nice framed prints as backgrounds.

Finally, a little note for any wedding photographers reading this.  It was a lot darker than it looks during that ceremony.  For the entire proceedings, I was shooting at 1/50th at f1.4 at ISO 6400.  That’s an EV (or more strictly a Light Value) of just 1, which means the room was at 5 Lux.  Apparently that’s the average level which lighting engineers aim for on an suburban street at night …

(We hope to have the client gallery of this wedding online sometime tomorrow.  Whenever it goes live, you’ll need to get login details from Lucie and Ross in order to access it.)

Thanks to the stories run in the daily papers suggesting that Jon Venables (who was convicted of murdering Jamie Bulger) was going by the name of David Calvert, David’s photography site has had over 50,000 hits in the last two days. Normally he’d be delighted that his website site is suddenly so popular, but at the moment he is obviously very concerned.

David is a well established photographer trading as David Calvert Photography, specialising in family and child portraiture in Hertfordshire.  He’s not related to David Calvert of Fleetwood, who has also been highlighted in the press and who is also not connected in any way with the Jamie Bulger case.

David has our support in these difficult circumstances and we hope very much that they pass without impact on him, his family or his business.

Just by way of a teaser while we’re still working on the pictures from Saturday’s wedding at the Andaz Liverpool Street, here’s one of Ann’s shots of Lucie’s Louboutins.  The full blog post should be up later today, then I’m hoping we can get the client gallery online tomorrow Friday.  There’s one heck of a lot of pictures in it …

According to the book, we now need to “Prepare A Wedding Package” but of course in 1988 we’re talking fillum.  A proper job, often done by a chap called Norman wearing a navy blue blazer with pens in the breast pocket, usually with his “trusty” Hasselblad camera on a tripod (usually referred to nowadays as a ‘blad on sticks).

All the pictures for Norman’s basic package would be shot on two 12-exposure films.  Twelve standard set-up shots starting with “Bride Getting Out Of Car” and finishing with “Happy Couple Pretending To Cut Cake” would account for one film, and the other would be committed to one shot of the couple plus five formal groups, each shot twice in the hope of all eyes being open in one of them.  Et voilà – all your wedding day memories enshrined in 18 pictures, lovingly presented in due course in a small album bound in cream leather-look vinyl with church bells and “Our Wedding” tastefully embossed on the front in faux gold leaf.

Having said that, I’m actually struggling to relate any of the book’s handy hints on package preparation to digital photography and the 21st Century, so we’ll just press on and get stuck straight in to “Planning The Shoot”.

Under that photo of the camp groom, it says “Ask him to stand slightly sideways-on in front of the camera for a more natural-looking pose”.  Oh we do like a natural-looking pose.

“A picture should be taken of the father helping the bride out of the car” – but there’s no advice about what to do if the idea doesn’t occur to Dad, or if the chauffeur decides to big up his part and takes over the show,  screwing up your only chance of a clear shot of the bride.

“Take a shot of the bride and her father from inside the church, framed in the doorway” – but again, nothing about the late guests pushing past them or the bridesmaid blocking your shot by needlessly faffing with the bride’s veil.

There’s a rather touching implication that there “shouldn’t be a problem” about you being able to take pictures during the ceremony, and I agree – there shouldn’t be.  But unfortunately, nowadays there usually is.

The presumption is that any picture of the signing of the register will be a fake set up after the real deed is done, with bride and groom artfully arranged before being blasted with enough direct flash to render them blind for the next minute or so.

On the recession, you’re advised to “stand halfway down the aisle and photograph the couple as they walk towards you.”  This would have worked in 1988 when more often than not wedding guests knew how to behave, but nowadays is guaranteed to result in you being elbowed out the way by a bunch of people intent upon grabbing a badly exposed out-of-focus picture of part of the bride on their iPhones.

Outside the church it’s time to take two pictures of the couple (one looking at each other, one at the camera) and a full-length of the bride after her mother and the chief bridesmaid have agreed upon exactly how the train should be arranged for best effect.  Your next task is to “Arrange the bridesmaids around the bride and take two shots, one with them all looking at the bride and one with them all looking at the camera.” I wonder if anybody ever reversed the order when in a silly mood and did the at camera ones first.

After that it’s the family groups done much as they still are, then a set-up confetti-throwing shot, then two shots of the couple in the “limousine”.  Yes, you guessed it – one looking at each other, then one at the camera.

Funnily enough there’s no mention of that 1980’s favourite “Couple About to Kiss as Flower Girl Peeps Round Tree With Hand Up To Mouth and Eyes Wide Open in Surprise”, but perhaps that’s one for the reception.  We’ll get to that next time …

You have been booked for the wedding of — on the — .  We have to vet all our suppliers for insurance reasons.    You will need to provide 2 references, examples of your work and an up to date CRB check if you are working with children on site.  We make a  charge for the vetting process.

So there!

I’ve known plenty of cases before of venues trying it on, but this one really is something else.  Providing proof that you have adequate public liability insurance is one thing, but references and examples of your work?  And since when has a CRB check been required to photograph any children who may be present at a wedding?

The clue is of course in the sentence “We have to vet all our suppliers for insurance reasons”, which is obviously just so much bullshit.  Sure enough, it seems that the reality is that suppliers (be they photographer, cakemaker, florist, whatever) are invited to pay £25 to be “vetted”, after which they can be a “preferred supplier” and then, in return for that privilege, kick back 10% of their bill to the venue each time they work there.

Where it gets really interesting though is that they’re trying this on with couples who already have contracts with both the venue and their photographers! So what are they going to do when a supplier responds to their email with an invitation to kindly get lost?  Do they say “OK then, you can’t work here” and immediately complicate the situation bigtime with the couples who have booked them, or do they just shrug their shoulders and let matters be, while quietly adding another name to their blacklist of suppliers who won’t cough up?

Whatever, word is that from now on, couples will have to use the preferred suppliers if they want to book the venue, which is actually fair enough if that’s made clear up front and people are daft enough to go along with it.  But isn’t it sad that some couples won’t realise that those suppliers are “preferred” not because they’re the best, but because they’re prepared to schmooze the venue and pay to be recommended by it?  And isn’t it inevitable that some if not all of those preferred suppliers will inflate their prices to cover the back-hander?

One thing’s for sure.  This whole “preferred supplier” thing is well past its best-before, but brides really do need to wake up to the fact that some places are still working it.  And it’s only the venue and those suppliers desperate enough to play its game who win.

(See also this post)

When we started out shooting weddings, one of the first things we did after getting a booking was to check out the venue. We did this because it seemed to be expected of us, because many of our competitors made a big deal of knowing the venue well, and because frankly we didn’t know any better.

After a while though, three things became apparent. One was that because we rarely work at local venues, noseying round one could easily wipe out half a working day or more. Another was that as we got more experience, we found that from an operational and logistics point of view, a lot of venues are actually very similar. And the third was we’d often find that on the wedding day, things turned out to be completely different to how they were when we looked at the place three months earlier.

That explains why we can only remember specifically checking one venue before a wedding in the last five years or so.  That was the Houses of Parliament, and then only because of the heightened security measures with which we needed to familiarise ourselves.  Well OK, that and the unusual pressure we were going to be under in view of who was going to be there, but that’s another story.

We’re not the happiest of bunnies if we’re at the same place more than twice a year: we tend to get bored with it and much prefer going in cold to somewhere new.  That’s in complete contrast to many old-school snappers who like nothing better than going back to familiar haunts – in some cases so familiar that it’s said their tripods leave marks in the grass where they set up the same shots week in, week out for six months of the year. Or in the case of the Kent photographer who shot 41 weddings at the same venue last year, nine months of the year.  He certainly knows that venue!

In case you’re wondering, those are some of the places we shot at for the first time last year sight unseen, and they are, from the top, Sunbeam Studios in Ladbroke Grove, HMS Belfast, Trinity College Cambridge, Auberge du Lac near Welwyn Garden City, Bristol’s Bordeaux Quay and St Edmund’s School Canterbury.

It wasn’t.  That’s a bride called Jacqui, and it was taken in the City on a glorious August afternoon, very soon after she and Richard had popped out the door of St Mary le Bow as husband and wife.

Jacqui wanted to do some pictures of the two of them together on the front of the Royal Exchange before walking back over the road to their reception at Coq d’Argent, and we’d just about finished when Richard spotted some of the guests waving to them from the roof garden. He therefore decided to check that all was well with the drinks and canapés, so borrowed Ann’s phone and wandered off down the steps to call the best man.

This left Jacqui all alone under the portico, bathed in the most wonderful light.  I said “He’s cleared off and left you.  What a bloke!”.  “Typical!”, said Jacqui, standing there with her hands on her hips.  She put on her sad little girl face and then started laughing, I grabbed four very quick shots, and this was the best of them.  It’s totally unposed, and it’s totally real. Actually there’s a bit of clue there that it’s not a studio shot – if it was, that cross round her neck would have been lined up properly and not left where it was stuck to her on that really hot day.

The following week, a couple of colleagues of ours were round here while I was finishing off the processing of Jacqui and Richard’s pictures, a lot of which they saw while we were chatting.  Not long afterwards, one of them, Sarah, told us that a new magazine was starting up and was desperate for more good London weddings pictures so why didn’t we send this one?  Then as now we weren’t big on sending pictures to magazines, but I was eventually nagged into phoning Jacqui when they were back from their honeymoon and asking her if she was cool with the idea, which she was.

Next thing I know I have the editor on the phone saying they’re going to run Jacqui’s wedding as a “Real Life Wedding” (don’t you just love that term?), and did I mind them using one of the pictures on the cover?

There’s actually a sequel to this story.  In due course, the publishers sent both ourselves and Jacqui a copy of the mag just before its official launch at the wedding show at Earls Court.  I then got a phone call one evening from Jacqui saying that she and Richard had just got back from Earls Court, at which they’d been on the magazine’s stand.  Apparently a permanently grinning  Richard had been handing out free copies to passing punters and saying to every one of them “That’s my wife on the front” …

However, this is what I ended up getting into.  The maintenance blokes were running an electricity supply across to a new ride that was being installed on the far side of the pier, and this was how it was done.

What these pictures don’t show though is just how strong the wind was blowing and how bitterly cold it was under there.  That yellow circle on the last shot shows the intrepid electrician under the spot where he had to thread the cable he’d dragged with him up through the decking.  And then of course he had to make his way back to the platform under the trapdoor …

Shooting over the professional’s shoulder at a wedding wasn’t cool 30 years ago and it’s still not cool now.  At worst it annoys the hell out of some wedding photographers who fear their reprint sales suffering as a consequence, and at best it’s a distraction which the pro working under pressure can do without.  If nothing else, a wannabee shooting over your shoulder while you’re doing the formal groups slows the job down,  and it reduces the chances of all eyes looking at the camera that matters.

Apparently the alternative to shadowing the pro is to stage your own fake wedding by persuading friends or family to dress up and act the part at the church or hotel of your choice.   According to the book, the big advantage is that you can shoot at your own pace, and make all the mistakes you might have made at your first real wedding without risking disappointing (or indeed getting sued by) the couple.  And “When you show the pictures, you don’t have to tell people that it is a fake wedding …”

Indeed.

Nowadays of course things are different – instead of going to all the trouble of arranging your own fake wedding, you simply pay up and turn out for a workshop or a course and snap away at a fake wedding which somebody else has set up for you.  That’s the explanation for those wedding photographer websites on which you can spot the same bride in two different dresses at weddings with no visible guests.   (Incidentally, it’s also the explanation for those portrait galleries featuring the cute kids and the blue door, but that’s a whole different can of worms.)

If a fake wedding seems too much hassle though, there’s a lot of mileage to be got out of just one model wearing a wedding dress -  pictures for your wedding photography portfolio, pictures for the model’s portfolio, pictures for the dress shop, and if you’re lucky, maybe even a win in some wedding photography competition or other.   Then you too can offer “Award Winning” wedding photography …

Whatever, by now you’re no doubt wondering how Ann and I got started shooting weddings.  The short answer is that I was doing quite a lot of headshots and portfolio work for actors and models, one of whose mum rang me up one day and said “I want you to photograph my wedding”.  “Sorry” says I “No.  Not a wedding photographer. Don’t do weddings and won’t.”

“Why not?” says Mum.

“Too much like hard work.  And besides, I don’t want to boss people about and do boring cheesy posed pictures”

To cut a long story short, every objection I came up with was countered, until in the end I said “OK.  I’ll turn out, shoot six rolls of 35mm film, print the pictures 9″ x 6″, put all the good ones in a nice plastic bag for you and give you the negatives.  But I’ll shoot it my way.”  I then quoted her a silly price to scare her off, but alas she agreed.  So I just turned out and shot the whole thing as a photo story with half a dozen informal groups thrown in, and enjoyed myself immensely. The couple loved their pictures.

Next thing you know, Ann and I take a stand at a small local wedding fair and book seven weddings on the strength of the pictures from that one wedding and my portrait portfolio.  OK, being cheap and having an empty diary wasn’t exactly a handicap, but basically we booked our first few weddings mainly on the strength of my portraits.  Now check out this awesome 1980’s bridal portrait from the book …

See what it says in the caption? “If you can take good portraits, then you can take good wedding photographs”.  Believe me, that is total nonsense.  It doesn’t follow at all.  That’s like saying if you can paint your front door, then you can paint the Forth Bridge.  Sure, being able to take a decent portrait helps, but portrait photography and wedding photography are two completely different animals.

By the way, I love the third sentence in that caption – “Many of the classic elements of portraiture are here – careful composition of the subject …”.  Really?  Even if you ignore the very much of-its-time fuzz round the edges of the picture, is that or is that not a singularly cluttered and distracting background?  And as for Variant #7 of the timeless Chin Resting On Hand pose, I just want to say that I have never, ever, taken a picture of somebody posing like that and I never will.  The same goes for the manly version of it which has the fingers curled into a fist and is therefore known as the Punch On The Chin pose.

Next time we’ll get on to the shot list and “Planning A Shoot”!