This was my seventh time as a Clearwell Castle wedding photographer. Here are a selection of images from the Forest of Dean wedding of Catherine & Tristum in Gloucestershire. They were married on 26th April 2019, it was bit of a cool day and kept us inside for the majority of the day. A lot of my clients do not enjoy posing for the camera, so today the vast majority of photographs were taken in the natural flow of the day. The only posed photographs were a handful of family and friend groups, the happy couple did take a walk around the castle’s gravel drive, but any portraits taken here were taken without instruction. The remainder of the images you see here are all taken unposed and unprompted. I really enjoy working in this manner. As the imagery is more about the emotion of the day and tells a story of those concerned, rather than any pre-conceived notions and ideas. It obviously takes a lot of faith in your photographer to be at hand and observant enough to capture these moments, for this I am truly appreciative. And probably explains why the majority of my work comes from word of mouth from previous clients. I had the pleasure of working with David from Wedding Video Solutions today and even he commented on how ‘hands-off’ I was for a photographer. He obviously gets to witness first hand how a lot of Clearwell Castle wedding photographers operate, and he went on say even those who described themselves as unobtrusive or documentary wedding photographers are not quite what they promise. It takes a lot of experience to be confident of capturing a wedding day without the advantage of controlling the logistics. If a photographer does decided to coerce and prompt, they run the risk of affecting the bride and groom’s memory of the day, rather than remembering true moments, they simply remember what the photographer instructed them to do. This also explains whys I prefer to shoot with ambient light as much as possible, avoiding electronic flash as much as possible. As this pulse of illumination all too often makes people aware of a photographer’s shutter release, and thus they might change their natural behaviour or become self conscious.
