Hackney Town Hall Wedding
Wedding portraits are a big part of a couple’s set of pictures, and employing a wedding photojournalist doesn’t mean you won’t get some beautiful portraits. What it should mean is that a couple are not taken away from their guests for a couple of hours by the photographer and told to ‘act naturally’ whilst standing in a corn field. Here’s a great example of that from some Hackney Town Hall wedding portraits with Kate and Kelly.
Kate and Kelly got married at Hackney Town Hall, London. Then, they walked with their guests through London Fields and Broadway Market to start their reception on a canal boat, ‘My Fair Lady’. The choices they made about these locations says something about them as a couple, and the wedding photography should reflect this. This portrait above shows some of the couples personality and background – they’re from New Zealand but their entire relationship has been in London. Kate loves posing for a camera, Kelly is the complete opposite!
The usual time to spend having some portraits taken is after the ceremony. This also happens to be one of the best opportunities for a documentary photographer to work at capturing the friends and family naturally, showing subtle relationships and using the geography of the venue to add a sense of place to the album. It’s also valuable mingle time for the newly weds to chat to a lot of their guests. So it’s not the best time to remove a couple for a long period of time for portraits.
But a good wedding photographer is always looking for opportunities to add environmental portraits to the collection. That doesn’t have to mean awkward poses. It doesn’t even have to mean stopping what they’re doing. Ideally it will show the couple clearly, and include some aspect of where they are. Here’s a more standard portrait of Kate and Kelly.
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