Vincent and Amy were married on a hot Saturday in July at The Granary Courtyard, a working farm at Hayford, out past Shrewsbury on the Shropshire border. Outdoor ceremony under a wooden gazebo, guests on hay bales, two dogs down the aisle, a marquee that ran into the evening. A full day, two photographers, and about as much daylight as a British summer gives you.
The Granary Courtyard
The venue is a farm rather than a hotel that happens to have a field. The ceremony area sits on the grass with an open-sided timber gazebo at one end and hay bales set out in rows for the guests, and behind it there is the old brick range and a marquee for the reception. There is no obvious separation between where the day happens and where the farm is, which is the whole appeal of it.
What that means for photographs is a lot of open sky and very little shade. July at midday on an exposed site is a hard light to work in and it does not flatter anybody. The way it works is to keep the middle of the day for the parts that need to be covered wherever they land, and hold the portraits back until the sun drops behind the treeline, which at that time of year is close to nine in the evening. The wide field behind the venue is the reason to wait. Once the light goes long across the cut corn it does most of the work.
Worth knowing if you are looking at the venue: the ceremony is outside, the reception is under canvas, and there is no indoor backup that would look like the same wedding. It went fine here because the weather held. Book it knowing that.
Two photographers, and where the second one earns their place
This was a full day booking with a second shooter, which for us means Luke is on the other side of the room for the whole thing rather than dropping in for the ceremony. On a day laid out like this one it matters more than usual.
The morning is the clearest example. The bridal suite and the groom's side were in different buildings, so one of us stayed with Amy and her mum through the getting ready and the other was outside with Vincent and the dogs. Neither of those is worth missing and one photographer has to pick. Through the ceremony it buys you the reverse angle, so the walk down the aisle exists from the front and from behind at the same moment, and the guest reactions exist at all.
Between the two cameras the day came to 5,189 frames before a single one was culled. That number is not a selling point on its own, it is just what a full day with two people on it actually looks like before the work of choosing starts. What came out the other side was 863 edited photographs.
The dogs
Both of their dogs were in the ceremony, walked down the aisle in dried flower collars that matched Amy's bouquet. Dogs at weddings are usually promised and then quietly dropped when someone realises nobody has thought about who holds the lead. Here it was planned properly: a named person responsible for them, a job for them to do, and no expectation that they would behave for longer than the two minutes they were needed.
They then spent the rest of the afternoon in the field and produced most of the best frames of the day, including a run at Amy's dress that she was completely unbothered by. If you are considering it, the practical version is this. Give the dogs one short task, give one guest sole responsibility for them, and let them be dogs the rest of the time.
The day
Rings and hair pieces on the oak table in the morning, Amy and her mum in matching pyjamas, the youngest guests already in and out of everything. The ceremony ran outside in full sun with the gazebo behind them and confetti on the way back out.
The afternoon moved between the marquee and the lawn, with a change into a red qipao partway through, family on both sides in the same field, and a long stretch of the day that was really just people sitting outside in the heat. The wedding party went out to the field at golden hour with smoke flares, which is the loudest thing on this page and was over in about four minutes. The portraits either side of it are the quiet version of the same twenty minutes.
First dance in the marquee under the lights, and the evening carried on after we left.
Wedding photography in Shropshire
We are based in Staffordshire and Shropshire is a regular run for us. This was the second Shropshire wedding of the summer, after Melanie and Cornelius at Westbury Village Hall, which was a two hour booking rather than a full day and is a useful comparison if you are weighing up how much coverage you actually need. If you are getting married at a farm, a barn or anywhere the day happens outdoors, have a look at the other weddings here or at the Staffordshire page for how we normally work.