Well we didn’t see that coming did we?

I’ve decided to entitle this post “reboot” as that’s what this year ended up feeling like on an artistic, personal and industry level. A year that nobody in their right minds would ever have chosen but we ended up having to either look for the positives or go crazy, or a little bit of both!

My ‘wedding year’ was supposed to start on May 9th 2020 and finish on December 30th 2020 with around 22 weddings in between, all over the world. My actual wedding year started on July 18th and finished on October 17th with just 6 short weddings in between. And those weddings were and will always be incredibly special to me in my life as a wedding photographer, which I’ve come to appreciate ten times more this year.

I’m not sure I will ever make sense of what happened this year – to our lives or businesses. I’m not sure any of us ever will. And you might be reading this thinking ‘how ridiculous to do a recap post of a year with virtually no weddings’… but I do these posts religiously every year (since 2012) almost as a diary entry for myself. So to not do a diary entry for one of the most unusual years I hope I’ll ever face in life, photography or business, would feel a massive shame, and a gaping hole in my diary.

These six couples trusted me with memories not only for them, but for the many people unable to attend their special days this year. As people attended virtually via Zoom or Facetime, or watched a live stream, or were only able to be there through the power of photography – my photography in this case. I always feel this sense of responsibility but I can honestly say I’ve never felt it more than this year, and I think I’ll carry that heightened sense of what weddings are into my future career.

I’ll admit it – I think there have been times in the last few years when I’ve taken this career as a wedding photographer for granted. I’ve never coasted but it was that old adage that ‘people will always get married’ and that somehow this industry of weddings is bulletproof. Turns out nothing is bulletproof. Turns out we can’t take anything for granted, and I will remind myself of that forever as I continue to capture these fleeting moments of concentrated life and love through my lenses for many years to come, with more pride than ever.

So thank you first of all to these couples who braved the storm of 2020 and went for it. Who swapped rings, joined families and did it at the most difficult time and asked me to be there with them.

Thanks equally to the couples who I was supposed to capture this year, but who took the heavy-hearted decisions to postpone their celebrations and to take me with them. I can’t wait to celebrate with you when your day arrives.

Normally I agonise for days whittling this post down to my self-prescribed maximum of 150. This year it was decidedly quicker and 50 felt like a more realistic number. So I hope you enjoy this little snapshot into the strangest year of certainly my life so far and I know many of you reading will feel the same.

Reboot.