Layer Marney Tower Wedding Photography, Essex
The changing life of a photograph
THE BREAKDOWN:
Wedding Location: Layer Marney Tower, Essex
In Brief: An exploration of the changing meaning of photographs alongside beautiful Autumnal light with layers and characters galore for Elly & Hugo’s Layer Marney Tower Wedding Photography
“Photographs change meaning over time and you never know which is going be the most powerful until you look back on you life”
When it comes to blogging we quite deliberately always post weddings and images photographed the previous year. But why do we do this? Why would we consciously choose to only showcase the photographs a year after they were taken rather than our most recent work?
Simply we like to give photographs a chance to breathe; to allow enough time to pass for us to remove our personal feelings from the image at the time they were taken. As photographers we wrap a lot of our own thoughts and feelings into the images we take, after all the weddings we attend are our memories too and we care about the day, the couple and the moments we capture. There’s an emotional resonance to images for those that were there, (ourselves included) and it’s easy for that nostalgia to cloud our opinions. Is this truly a good photograph? Does it tell the story in its own right? Or are our minds and emotional attachments filling in the blanks from our own memories of the event?
When it comes to picking the photos we want to be crystal clear on the choices we make, with clear photographic principles of story, composition, moment and light guiding us in our choices. We want to think as neutrally as possible about how the image makes you feel, not how it made us or our couples feel at first viewing but how it makes you feel now, does the image evoke laughter, happiness, even sadness?
The reason we do this is that, unlike the couple themselves or their guests, the people who look at our blog didn’t hear the jokes that were being told, they didn’t get to feel the emotion of that moment or understand the intimate connections between the people we saw around us, they are looking at the photographs completely cold. Our ambition is that when those outsiders to the wedding look at the photographs they should feel like they knew the couple, feel like they knew the wedding guests, felt the emotions, the laughter, the relationships. We want to create photographs that make it all come alive again on the page like a storybook.
As photographers we’re constantly pushing ourselves to be better; to find new compositions, to see things and make connections that we haven’t made before. That excitement of an incredible wedding, an amazing couple, a brilliant experience and of taking a photograph you’re really proud of sometimes makes it oh so difficult to keep to our ‘year behind’ blogging mantra and we find ourselves wanting to blog the images immediately. El and Hugo’s was definitely one of those weddings we’ve been absolutely itching to share! A beautiful autumn October day with the kind of stunning low light that you dream of during the colder months, not to mention a wonderful, characterful collection of people who were simply a delight to photograph and share the experience of such a simply brilliant day with.
We could have chosen so many more from this autumnal scene but these are just a few of our favourites.
Dom & Liam
Enjoyed our Layer Marney Hall Wedding Photography?
If you’re looking for a photographer to capture your Layer Marney Hall Wedding or if you connected with our street-inspired documentary style and would be interested in chatting about your wedding elsewhere in the world we’d love to connect and see what we can offer!