Weddings are real. Weddings are real days, in your real lives, where you’re the same people as you are today. Weddings are everyday life, amplified a million times over: excitement, laughter, love and the people you invite to be around you, bring that amplifying effect. If I were to follow that sentence with something about a dress, and floral styling, it wouldn’t quite fit… and yet that’s how we’re generally shown weddings in the media. (Wedding blogs included – we publish weddings with beautiful styling and details, and they’re a joy to share.) But gorgeous styling isn’t what will stand the test of time in your images. We have to turn our attention back to people for that.

The heart and soul of any wedding is the couple at the centre of the celebrations, and their relationships with the people they choose to celebrate beside them. This is what will matter when you and your families look back at your wedding photos in years to come.

Documentary wedding photography (explained beautifully here) gives you images bursting with personality, captured with thoughtfulness and humour which resonates with you… they’re something truly special.

If you are looking for excellent wedding photography which breaks the mould, steps outside of the norms of “kiss the bride, confetti shot, floral styling + classic list of key moments” – I urge you to take 3 minutes to read The Fairytale Trap. It’s how York Place Studios introduce their blog of Annie & Jonny’s wedding – and it might just turn everything you thought you knew about wedding photography upside down. In a really, really GOOD way.

Annie and Jonny loved York Place Studios’ approach to wedding photography. They weren’t looking for posed pictures or clichés, but something really different that would capture the soul of their day, the personalities of everyone there (in images to last a lifetime), the squeezy hugs and the love of everyone around them. (That’s not to say that there were no portraits of the couple – documentary wedding portraits are something far more interesting and different – more here.) Annie & Jonny’s outdoor wedding had a relaxed vibe, and their day has an undercurrent of joyful chaos because a) the children bring so much fun and b) that’s what weddings are!

—humour

Here’s what their award winning wedding photographers at York Place Studios said about their wedding.

“On a wedding day we will take romantic photographs, we will take comedic photographs, loving moments, oddities in reality, big beats, small beats and everything in between. But the work we share is the imagery that we hope you will connect with most strongly. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, indeed many will undoubtedly say we should just have cropped in on that beautiful moment of children running, baskets in hand, toward the wedding ceremony. But that is precisely the point – we don’t strive for universal appeal, we seek like-minded souls. Because when, as with the wonderful Annie & Jonny, we really connect and understand one another, we can truly be your eyes on a day bursting with hidden visual treats.”

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