One Friendly Place WeddingsA wedding photographer's guide

What’s particularly special about this venue is just how interesting the decor is to begin with – you don’t need to do anything to already have a venue full of personality but if you choose to you can absolutely roll with the theme and turn cool and quirky into insanely individual. On the other hand you could use the space as a complete blank canvas – bring in an events company to drape off the space or cover it in starcloths, install a temporary lighting rig and voila – you have a whole new space that looks nothing like what you started with. With a space like One Friendly Place the possibilities are endless!

“You don’t need to do anything to already have a venue full of personality but if you choose to you can absolutely roll with the theme and turn cool and quirky into insanely individual.”

Going DIY with your wedding certainly isn’t for everyone, but for those who are ready to embrace the challenge it can have huge advantages. The capacity to truly express your personality is, as we’ve already mentioned, probably top of the list – you can bring in all your own decorations, fill it with photographs, put up bunting, bring in plants and turn it into an indoor garden, turn the cabaret space into an actual full blown cabaret themed wedding – with enough time and creativity you can achieve pretty much whatever you can imagine.

You can lay out furniture however you want, utilise whichever space for whatever purpose you want and design every aspect rather than being limited by what the venue requires. Whilst wedding venue staff will always try to be helpful and embrace your ideas as much as they can, most wedding venues do, to some extent at least, have a set way of doing things. They have a preconceived idea of what a wedding is and how it should be run and that can of course be a huge advantage – it means things rarely go wrong and everything’s much easier to plan. But it can also be restricting if you really do want to break the rules of anything they’ve done before. With One Friendly Place and other DIY wedding venues there’s no such problem, you only have to ensure you return it to its original state when you’re done.

For us as documentary wedding photographers and videographers we see the ability to break the rules as a huge advantage. For us the reception is our favourite part of the day because it’s the time when you and your guests are less governed by tradition – you’re not being told what to do by this stage of the wedding, you’re just embracing it spontaneously and having fun. That spontaneity is essential to our work and in a venue that allows all those rules and traditions to be discarded spontaneity is going to be absolutely rife, making the opportunities for candid, reportage, real documentary moments all the more possible.