Lyn and Nic were married on a Sunday afternoon in late August at the Stone House Hotel, on the Stafford road just outside Stone. They booked four hours. Not a full day, not a film, just the afternoon covered properly from the ceremony onwards. Four hours turned out to hold a great deal more of a wedding than most people would expect.
Four hours, and what actually fits in them
Wedding photography is usually sold by the day, and for a lot of couples that is the right thing to buy. For plenty of others it is not. Lyn and Nic knew what they wanted well in advance: the ceremony, family photographs, and the two of them together. A good mix, as Lyn put it, and nothing more complicated than that.
Coverage started at three, half an hour before the ceremony, and finished just before seven. Inside that window: the room and the details before anyone sat down, the ceremony from start to finish, the rings, the blending, the signing, the walk back down the aisle, an hour in the garden with eighty guests, the full run of family groups, portraits of the two of them, the wedding breakfast, the speeches and the first of the dancing. Two hundred and ninety two edited photographs.
The reason it fits is that the day itself was compressed. A three thirty ceremony with everything following straight on means there is no dead time to photograph around. That cuts both ways, and it is worth being straight about it. A short booking has no slack in it. The family groups have to be known in advance, the schedule has to actually hold, and there is no room to recover from a slow start. Planned properly it works. Left to chance it does not.
What four hours does not buy is the morning. No getting ready, no first look, nothing before the guests arrive. We said that before they booked rather than after.
The Stone House Hotel
The Stone House sits on Stafford Road just south of Stone, a Georgian building with a much more modern interior behind the front. For photographs the useful thing about it is that the ceremony room has windows down one side and pale walls, so the whole ceremony was lit by daylight with nothing added. That single fact is most of what makes a room easy or difficult to work in.
Behind the hotel there is a garden with a lawn, a terrace, planting and a scattering of benches, which is where the eighty guests spent the hour after the ceremony in full sun. It gave us somewhere to put the family groups with green behind them and somewhere for people to spread out rather than bunch up by a door. Inside, a large gilt mirror in one of the hallways turned out to be the best spot in the building for the two of them on their own.
For anyone weighing the venue up: window light in the ceremony room, a garden that works in the afternoon, and enough indoor corners that rain would not have ruined it. That is the short version.
The day
Eighty guests, a room that filled early, and two of them at the front in matching grey waistcoats and lilac shirts, laughing before anything had started. That set the tone for the whole afternoon and it never really changed.
The ceremony ran straight through at half three. Rings, then a blending, the two of them pouring from separate bottles into one glass, then the register. The photograph of both their hands on the register afterwards, rings on, is the one that will end up on a wall.
Afterwards the whole thing moved out into the garden and stayed there for an hour, which is where most of the best pictures of other people came from. An ice cream van turned up. The children took over the lawn. We worked through the family groups while everyone was still in one place, then took Lyn and Nic inside for ten minutes on their own.
The wedding breakfast, the speeches and the start of the dancing all happened before seven. We covered it and left them to the rest of the evening. The full edited set was back with them inside a day.
Two brides
This was a same sex wedding, and it is worth a line here for the practical reason that couples searching for a photographer often want to know whether they will have to explain themselves first. You will not. There is no version of the day that we treat differently, no separate list of poses, and no assumption about who is walking in or who is standing where. We ask the same question we ask everybody, which is what matters to you and who needs to be in the photographs.
The one thing that is genuinely different is that a lot of the standard wedding running order assumes one of each, and plenty of couples want to keep some of it and drop the rest. Lyn and Nic walked in together. That is worth knowing in advance so nobody is stood in the wrong place, and it is the sort of thing a five minute conversation sorts out.
Photography in Staffordshire
We are based in Stafford, ten minutes down the road from the Stone House, and work across Staffordshire and the West Midlands. If you are getting married somewhere that does not need a full day of coverage, it is worth asking about a shorter booking rather than assuming you have to buy the whole thing. Have a look at the other weddings here, or at the Staffordshire page for how we normally work. There is another short booking written up over at Melanie and Cornelius's village hall wedding in Shropshire.