Bardney Hall – The New Venue for the More Intimate Wedding

This is a new venue to excite all you brides who are looking for an intimate and exclusive location for your wedding. Let’s face it – there are few enough good wedding venues in Lincolnshire anyway, but if you have a smaller wedding and want that cosiness matched in your surroundings then choices are few and far between.

Bardney Hall -situated in a sleepy little area of Barton on Humber ( and can you get anywhere sleepier than that?) ticks all the right boxes for couples looking for a quiet retreat in luxurious yet homely surroundings. The Hall has been extensively and, doubtless, expensively renovated to restore it to its former glory. Couples have exclusive use of the Hall and its grounds whilst being catered for to the highest standards by the Hall’s staff.

We haven’t covered a wedding here yet. We wrote the paragraph above some 18 months ago but since posting our initial excitement about this venue’s potential we understand that staffing changes and in particular changes of wedding co-ordinators have resulted in unfortunate difficulties and some disappointments. We have no personal experiences here- either good or bad- and it would be wrong of us to condemn on the grounds of heresay. We still believe there is enormous potential for the Hall to be a top wedding venue and we trust that any problems they have experienced are now behind them.

Coming Soon

We want to get our Blog rolling as fast as possible. There’s so much we want to tell you and so little time for us to do it. It’s almost a pity that we have a business to run and can’t devote more time to compiling the Info-Blog.

So we’re going to have to limit ourselves and deal with venues/services which we find most exciting OR that we know brides often ask about. In the short-term this means there will be enormous gaps. In the long-term the gaps should be filled in and we’ll have a much more comprehensive offering for you. In the meantime, if there is any wedding service you would like more information about – or would like to comment on then please feel free to post. But remember please, keep things factual with no negativity and DEFINITELY no advertising. If we suspect service providers are trying to post positive comments about themselves in order to advertise then we will have no hesitation in deleting the posts.

Now we’re into the Wedding Season our workload is horrendous – and whilst our new website is up and running, it still has some major glitches ( particularly on the ordering side) to iron out. So time for uploading information about more suppliers will be limited. Nevertheless, through the course of September and October we hope to cover:

More tips to make you wedding go smoothly

News on several more weddings we have covered.

More vendors and suppliers whom we feel we can fully recommend.

News of an exciting new venue in Lincolnshire. This is one place we’re really excited about.

How we intend to stay ahead of the competition in the coming year

If we can cover more than this, we will. But our existing wedding clients always come first, of course.

Wedding Photography Styles – the jargon buster

A simple guide to help you better understand the differing approaches photographers use:

1. Traditional - Photography which aims to record attendees rather than convey emotion. Usually a lot of formal groups and stiff poses. Photos of the couple are often called ‘grip’n'grin’s. Says it all, really.
2. Contemporary – can be used widely to mean anything that isn’t stiffly posed. This is a pretty broad church and in itself tells you little. Perhaps the following are of more use -
3. Reportage – fly-on-the-wall photography. Some reportage photographers don’t even introduce themselves or say when they are leaving. They want to be as unobtrusive as possible and capture what happens, not influence events.
4. Photo-journalism – a variant on reportage. Mainly candid shots are taken but some groups may be set up.
5. Artistic – as you might expect, this can mean different to things to different photographers. It is more interpretative than ‘standard’ photography and demands a more visionary approach than mere recording. A simple example would be to focus on, say, a wine glass on a table, but with the couple visible though out of focus in the background. On a more extreme level this can refer to shots which are taken with the deliberate intention that they only be seen AFTER much post-production work.

Do We Have All The Answers?

No, of course not. And in most cases there won’t be a ‘right’ answer – only the answer that is right for YOU. But with several hundred weddings behind us we’ve been to all the major venues in Lincolnshire – and many across the whole country. We’ve seen how couples are treated, what happens behind the scenes, ‘problem’ dresses, shoes, cakes and videographers ( Oh, the stories we could tell about videographers!) So everything that is new or an unknown quantity to you is old-hat to us. In the weeks and months ahead we hope to cover all the major areas of the wedding ‘industry’, giving you an insight into workings of the best within the various sections of the industry. We’ll be honest and open, but it’s not our job to criticize or be negative. The businesses we comment on will be the best. Our brides are discerning and want nothing less. Be aware though – if a business is not mentioned then this may not be because it is inferior, but simply because we can’t mention everyone at once. If in doubt just give us a ring!

To Blog or Not to Blog?

You know the way we work. We’re not loud, we’re not intrusive, we’re not domineering. We don’t spend all our time boasting how good we are and how poor all our competition is.

So why have a blog? Surely a photographer’s blog is the place where he or she can blow their own trumpet and rubbish the opposition simultaneously. A blog can’t be compatible with Carole and Peter’s style, can it?

Well, actually that’s the only reason why we’ve never had one before. We don’t act like other photographers, our work doesn’t look like anyone else’s and we never copy what others are doing. So no blog.

Until now. The website problems we’ve experienced have forced us to take a stand back and look at all aspects of our business and what sets us apart from others. And if we’re honest it’s our pride. Not in a bad way, I hope. But because we come from other professional backgrounds and have come into photography comparatively late in life we can approach it from a fresh perspective and with priorities that are very different from if we had to pay the mortgage/raise children/save for retirement etc etc. What we get out of it is huge personal pride and the satisfaction of doing a job even better than our clients had dared hope for.

So why not extend that to a blog? The blog can become a place not to vaunt ourselves, but to pass on some of the knowledge we have acquired over the years. We know a HUGE number of wedding-related businesses. Not just the venues, but the dress shops, the florists, the cake makers, the entertainers – and so on. Oh, and having been to quite a few hundred weddings we are able to advise first hand on what might work and what should definitely be avoided!

And so THAT is how we hope the blog will develop. Sure, we’ll be posting news about weddings we’ve covered, foreign masterclasses we’ve attended and all the usual stuff. But we want the site to become a RESOURCE for our brides. One that’s created from first hand knowledge over many years, not a pseudo-resource compiled by a journalist who is being paid to recommend an advertiser. It’ll be honest and it’ll be upfront. It’ll take a while to get up to speed but once it’s built it should evolve into a primary knowledge base for the more discerning brides.

All this is embryonic, of course. And we’d value your input. Any suggestions as to how you would like to see the blog develop would be more than welcome. Look forward to hearing from you

Aurora’s Web Presence

Some of you will know we’ve had a pretty rocky ride with our website over recent months. The new site we commissioned last February didn’t go live until July and never really worked properly. By October the galleries were dead, the map was dead and the impression to anyone visiting our site was that we were one of the myriad of photographers who are hobbyists and not interested in quality or detail. NOT, like us, NOT what we wanted at all and those of you who know us will appreciate just how upset we were by the whole business.

Hopefully these things are behind us. We can’t say too much because there are legal issues here, but let’s just say we are no longer with those web designers/hosts and are well on the way to having a beautiful new website designed and built for us by Metanym of Gainsborough. May 1st is the predicted date for going live and we can’t wait to leave the awful temporary site we are using at the moment. That stark, bold format and old-fashioned navigation couldn’t be less like us, but it does at least allow us to maintain a web-presence and so continue hosting clients pictures as we have always done in the past.

Please, keep popping in to check whether our new site is up and running. The address, as ever, is www.aurorastudio.co.uk