Rebecca and Shaun’s wedding party at Quay Restaurant, Circular Quay

How do you photograph a wedding party when the bride declined a wedding photographer?

Most marriages involve compromises but usually there is a honeymoon period before the compromising starts…..

Rebecca didn’t want a wedding photographer, Shaun did. The compromise was no photographer at the wedding but a photographer at the party the next day, but only for an hour.

So, how do you photograph a bride who hates photographers?

Firstly, I made the process as painless as possible – in under a minute I explained how to pose and I photographed the couple in under two minutes.

The ‘formal’ photography was tricky. On the balcony of the overseas passenger terminal with the Opera House as a background it should have been ideal but there were large  building works going on with cranes everywhere. Not a good look for the background for wedding photos! Fortunately, Shaun was tall so I used his body to block the building work and photographed the couple from the waist up to conceal the building work below. In post production I removed the railings to give the sense the couple posed by the waters edge.

Then it was time to photograph the wedding party. This needed to be done unobtrusively. The function was intimate, thirty guests were invited and the venue was small, so it was hard to be invisible especially since the lighting was so dark that I had to use flash. Fortunately the ceiling was low and mirrored so I could bounce my flash off it.

As it was a Chinese/Australian wedding, there was a tea ceremony and gifts of money, slightly chaotic so definitely no posing could take place.

Then some candid photography of the guests. Here Rebecca is showing her ring to her mother-in-law and sister-in-law.

I work alone at weddings without an assistant to minimise disrupting the wedding. I can always find a brilliant assistant on the day – in this case it was Cindy, Rebecca’s sister, who was fantastic at finding guests to be photographed.