The wedding of Jessica & Lee: All creatures great and small

A couple of weeks ago I had the great responsibility of capturing the wedding day memories of Jessica and Lee. They booked me around 18 months ago to cover their wedding photography needs, and around 4 months ago we met to do the pre-wedding meet-up and photoshoot; in all honestly, the time has flown by (as I'm sure it has for Jessica and Lee).

Their wedding took place at Rushpool Hall {link} in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, a lovely venue I've shot at many times; however, rather annoyingly, I've never had much luck with the weather at this venue to fully do it justice, regardless of the time of year I've been booked for.

I know...a good photographer isn't affected by the weather, and I feel I’ve done a good job in the past at Rushpool Hall when the heavens have opened and the gale force winds have hit, but I've always known the potential this venue has, and just wanted to do have the opportunity to shoot it in favourable conditions.

So, in typical fashion, weather warnings were posted by the Met Office for severe rain and Supercell storm for the night before and the morning of the wedding - which pretty much is what happened, with thunder rumbling at 4:30am the day of the wedding.

However, the wedding fairies showed mercy and the temperature climbed throughout the morning, drying away any wetness on the ground and at around noon the sun made an appearance – it was at this point that I knew it was going to be a good day.

It was a relatively late kick-off for Jessica and Lee’s wedding (3pm), so I arrived just before 1pm to start the pre-bridal preparations in the bridal suite; always my favourite part of the day because it’s so unstructured and the bridal party are usually full of nervous energy. Jessica had the dresses already hanging from the 4-poster bed, which saved me the indignity of trying to hang them up for photos (since I’m vertically challenged somewhat).

The bride’s horse (Lemon is his name) also made an appearance and took some of the limelight from the groom, but was a great prop for some really good photos. There was also a dove release, something I’d not experienced at any weddings previously and relished the challenge of capturing the release. Even the peacocks tried to gate-crash the wedding meal by getting into the conservatory – which gave me a chance to get some close-ups of the elusive creature.

Jessica and Lee have a little girl, Harriet, who was very co-operative on the day and even allowed me to take her off for some stunning portraits which will be a nice surprise for the couple when I show them their final suite of images.

As well as being a special day for Jessica and Lee it was also a special day for Jessica’s parents and grandparents who also share the same wedding anniversary date – 4th July.

While it was warm, there was an occasional breeze, which I’m sure everyone appreciated; although I’ve never drank so much ice-water at a wedding before, it really was that hot.

All in all, it was as close to a perfect day as you can expect (given all the elements at play on a wedding day) and I cannot wait to show them the moments I’ve captured from their special day.

Better to be safe than sorry

As a professional wedding photographer I regularly deal with thousands of image files from any one day’s shooting – often covering events that are unique, without the possibly of a re-shoot. Therefore, it cannot be stressed enough the importance I place on the storage of the images I’m entrusted with...I shudder just thinking about having to ever go to a couple and inform them I’ve lost all the visual memories from their Special Day.

Why bring this up you might ask?

Just last week one of my hard drives had a catastrophic meltdown – a drive which stores ALL my client and personal images! Thankfully, because I adopted a hard drive mirroring facility (where the data on one drive is duplicated on another in real-time) the only inconvenience I had was that of money (for the cost of replacement drives) and time (waiting for the replacement drives to arrive and installation). However, had I not foresaw (and invested) in such a safety mechanism, this would be a very much different blog post.

It’s not just the short and long term storage of images which I take into consideration. It starts with the actual capturing of the images on the Big Day. I have more than one camera body, multiple lenses covering a variety of focal lengths, investment in pro-level camera bodies and lenses and I don’t store all the photos on one high capacity memory card; I split them over a number of 8GB & 16GB cards – so that if one card is lost or fails I only lose the images on that card and no the whole days shoot

Next is the post-shoot workflow processes for images storage. As soon as I arrive home after a day’s shooting (after demolishing some fast food) I import all photos from the memory cards onto my PC with one copy going onto my mirrored drive and another on an external network drive. Copies are also archived on a physical backup (DVDs), which is stored at a separate location the next day; I won’t format the memory cards until all backups have been stored and checked.

Once I’ve processed the wedding photos and delivered them to the client I’ll purge my main drive leaving only the hi-res final images, album design and accompanying files; with a copy of the complete final output being stored again on DVD and a network / cloud drive (along with the original raw backup). Also, for those couples who have purchased a licence to print the images I give them two copies – one to put in a safe place and another for taking to friends and family or printing.

This all may seem a bit over the top (and it is, until you need it), but in this day and age people rarely print images (even I’m guilty of this) and keep images in digital format on their phones, tablets or laptop – not giving much thought to what would happen if those devices were lost or damaged. For the typical person, if they had encountered a disk failure there would probably been no recovery of those images, which could have resulted years’ worth of irreplaceable memories being lost. So my advice to anyone is to regularly backup your photos, and print them – or do something with them; in terms of entrusting someone with your wedding photography – ask what safeguarding procedures they have in place for wedding photos, and what long-term storage policies they have.