Some weddings are built around grand venues, huge floral displays and carefully planned photographs. Others are about the people.
This wedding was very much the second kind.
The day began at St Albans Register Office before everyone headed to The Bennet’s Club in Harpenden for the reception. It was relaxed, personal and full of the sort of moments I enjoy photographing most: laughter, children doing their own thing, guests chatting at the bar and people forgetting that I was there.
That is exactly how I like to photograph a wedding.
Getting married at St Albans Register Office
St Albans Register Office is at The Gatehouse on Victoria Square. It is an interesting building in its own right, having originally been the governor’s residence for the Victorian prison. The ceremony room is on the ground floor and can accommodate up to 60 guests, excluding the couple and photographer.
For couples looking for a St Albans Register Office wedding photographer, it is also a good example of why a smaller civil ceremony does not mean you end up with fewer opportunities for photographs.
Quite the opposite.
The ceremony was full of small interactions. The bride walking into the room. The groom turning to see her. Guests watching from only a few feet away. The exchange of rings. A smile or laugh that lasts for half a second.
Those are the photographs I am looking for.
I work in a documentary way, so during the ceremony I am not trying to manufacture moments or constantly move people around. I want the photographs to show what actually happened and, more importantly, what it felt like to be there.
After the ceremony, there was time for a few photographs outside the Register Office. I always think there is a place for these more traditional photographs. Documentary wedding photography does not mean refusing to take a photograph of the couple looking at the camera. That would be taking the idea rather too seriously.
The important thing is that these photographs do not take over the day.
From St Albans to The Bennet’s Club in Harpenden
After the ceremony, the celebrations moved to The Bennet’s Club in Harpenden.
The club is on Leyton Road in Harpenden and has both a large function hall and a smaller lounge. Harpenden Town Council lists the main function space as accommodating up to 200 people.
For this wedding, it created something completely different from the ceremony.
And that change is part of the story.
The Register Office was about the marriage itself. Once everyone arrived in Harpenden, the formality began to disappear. Jackets loosened, drinks appeared and conversations started happening in every corner of the room.
From a photography point of view, that is when things become interesting.
Photographing what happens between the big moments
One of my favourite things about photographing weddings is that the photographs couples eventually love are not always the ones they expected.
Of course, the ceremony matters. So do the rings, the couple photographs and the speeches.
But a wedding happens around those things as well.
Someone laughing at the bar.
A guest reacting to something happening across the room.
Children investigating things they probably weren’t meant to investigate.
Friends gathering together.
People laughing during the speeches.
And, later in the evening, somebody wearing an enormous pair of novelty glasses and a bow tie that would probably require planning permission if it were any larger.
These aren’t interruptions to the wedding.
They are the wedding.
That is why I spend so much of the day watching rather than directing.
The children had other ideas
Children at weddings are wonderfully unreliable.
You can plan where they are supposed to stand, what they are supposed to wear and roughly what they are supposed to do.
They have not read the plan.
At this wedding, that worked beautifully.
One of my favourite photographs from the reception is of a young boy sitting inside one of the huge illuminated letters. It was not staged. He had simply found somewhere considerably more interesting to sit than a chair.
Those are exactly the little pieces of a wedding day I want to preserve.
Years later, that photograph will say far more about him at that age than a perfectly arranged photograph ever could.
Speeches, laughter and reactions
Speeches are another part of the day where I spend almost as much time looking away from the person speaking as I do photographing them.
The speech matters.
The reactions often matter more.
While someone is talking, there can be dozens of little stories happening around the room. Someone knows exactly where the story is heading. Someone else clearly doesn’t. A parent is laughing. A friend is trying not to. The bride catches someone’s eye across the room.
Those expressions disappear almost immediately.
Photography lets us keep them.
The photographs from this reception capture that atmosphere particularly well. They are not simply photographs of people standing in a room. Together, they begin to show the relationships between them.
Natural wedding photography in Hertfordshire
I photograph weddings throughout St Albans, Harpenden and Hertfordshire, and my approach is deliberately simple.
I do not want a couple to spend their wedding day being photographed.
I want them to spend it getting married, celebrating with their family and friends and enjoying themselves.
My job is to photograph what happens.
There will usually be a small number of family photographs and some relaxed photographs of the couple, but I keep these as straightforward as possible. For most of the day I work quietly in the background, looking for genuine expressions, humour and all the little moments that connect the bigger parts of the story.
The photographs from this St Albans and Harpenden wedding are a good example.
There are photographs of the ceremony and the couple together, but there are also photographs at the bar, children playing, guests laughing, speeches, ridiculous hats and the general organised chaos that tends to appear whenever you put everyone you know into one room.
That balance matters to me.
Because when a couple looks through their photographs in ten or twenty years, I don’t just want them to remember what their wedding looked like.
I want them to remember the people who were there and how the day felt.
And this one looked like it was a lot of fun.