Wedding Photography 2014

This is just a tribute!

Oh 2014, you have treated me well. The year began with Faye and Lee’s wedding at Iscoyd Park and finished for me last weekend with Katie and Rog’s brilliant Inverness wedding. In between I’ve been all over this beautiful little country we live in, including iconic venues like Claridges in London, wonderfully different venues such as Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire, and even a few new places in my Cheshire homeland. I photographed my first military wedding and first two Jewish weddings this year, saw a dove release and took a photo of a groom wearing nothing but his socks and shoes! I heard an entire room sing That’s Amore (goosebumps), witnessed naked men swim in Loch Ness in December, saw a 9 year old best man have 60 grown ups rolling around with laughter and I even reduced one bride to tears myself just by showing her a photo of her shoes on the back of my camera! I wish I could list everybody and every memory but this is supposed to be about photos! 2014 has etched a whole chapter of amazing things in my memory banks.

I’ve not travelled as often as I did last year, but in January I was fortunate to travel to Lapland for Nico and Rik’s intimate and incredibly cold wedding and in April Meera and Meeraj’s Thailand wedding extravaganza blew parts of my mind I didn’t know existed. I also crossed the Irish Sea to assist my best friend, amazing wedding photographer and proud new dad Chris Mee at Denise and John’s wedding in Dublin. I’ve photographed weddings in six different countries this year (including England)! That makes it ten countries in total now!

Of course I love to travel to these exotic places but truthfully (and as cliche as this sounds, I really mean it) 2014 has been so brilliant because of the people I’ve met and the stories I’ve seen and captured. I’ve been extremely fortunate to watch 47 amazing couples become husband and wife this year and lived one of the best days of their lives with them. I’ve created collections of images which are meaningful to them and to me. It is to these 94 wonderful people that I’m eternally grateful for inviting me into their lives and trusting me to take photos for them to treasure forever. You can call it a job if you like – I don’t – I’ve had jobs before and they didn’t feel like this.

This year has also been significant for me in awards. I’ve won a Fearless Award, ten ISPWP awards, a 9th place overall finish in the ISPWP Fall contest, and I was named amongst the best of the best destination wedding photographers by Junebug Weddings. When I started out, I just wanted to take nice photos of people at weddings, and that’s still all I want really, but the recognition of these international awards means a lot to me.

So what does 2015 have in store? With 30 weddings already in the diary the year is pretty well mapped out for me already. My first five weddings next year are all at new venues for me, including trips back to France and Thailand. I’m also running the Nine Dots Workshop with three great photographer friends. I truly can’t wait to see what 2015 has in store for me – the people I’m going to meet, the things I’m going to see and the places I’m going to visit! I’ll be expecting lots more of the unexpected!

Next year I also plan to exercise a lot more, eat a lot fewer ginger biscuits, spend a lot more time with my wife and boys and keep my car cleaner.

It’s really not possible for me to sum up in one small collection of photos just how much I have loved this year. So what follows is a concentrated and fairly random collection of around 150 of my favourite moments from this past wonderful twelve months of Cheshire wedding photography and destination wedding photography.

2014… in the immortal words of Tenacious D – this is just a tribute!