What photographing TV taught me about weddings

I’ve spent a fairly large chunk of the last decade photographing people on television.

Big reality shows. Tiny crews. Huge studios. Ridiculous locations. Celebrities. Contestants. People having the absolute time of their lives and people having a decidedly less good day.

And somewhere along the way, it taught me something that has become a massive part of how I photograph weddings.

Taking a good photograph is actually the easy bit.

The difficult bit is connecting with the person in front of the camera.

Because most people aren’t models.

They don’t instinctively know what to do when someone points a camera at them. In fact, quite a lot of perfectly confident, funny, brilliant people become incredibly strange the second they realise they’re being photographed.

Hands suddenly become a problem.

Smiles become weird.

Nobody knows where to look.

And that’s completely normal.

People need to trust you first

What if we really hate having our photo taken?

You’re honestly in the majority — and it’s completely fine.

Most couples I work with start by telling me they feel awkward in front of the camera and really don’t want loads of posing. That’s pretty much why I work the way I do.

I shoot weddings in a relaxed, documentary way, which means I’m not constantly stopping you, arranging you, or asking you to “perform”. I’ll give gentle guidance when it helps, but mostly I let things unfold naturally so you can just be yourselves and forget I’m there.