Aurora in China

O.K, the piccy above is s napshot. There’s a reason for this  which I’ll explain in a minute. But first i want to apologize to those of you who have been trying to contact us recently but have not got past the answer-phone or unanswered emails. This year has been our busiest ever – too busy in fact and we’re going to cut back on our workload next year – and by the end of summer we were almost completely exhausted. We believe that people shouldn’t have to wait long for their albums and so we always work long hours to complete them as quickly as we can. But with all but one of our clients this year choosing either of our top two album packages this has meant us spending about 100 hours per album before it reaches the quality we demand. So we’ve been pretty shattered. Hence the need for a holiday – and a three week gap between weddings in October provided just the perfect opportunity. And October is th best time to visit China.

I’m not going to bore you with endless holiday stories and pictures. China’s an amazing place and completely blew our minds. The people are kind and welcoming, the food is fantastic (well, most of it- the dish of offal we ordered by mistake was a definite no-no), and the building work is absolutely everywhere. The country’s growth-rate is beyond anything we can comprehend in this country and China is now a whole series of contradictions between the old, poor China and the new, very rich China.

Being the sad people we are, we can never leave wedding photography behind us and so we were keen to discover something about how things are done in the Orient. Chinese wedding photography is very different from that in the U.K. They have a whole day of formal, studio photography before the wedding. Everyone dresses in their wedding clothes and poses for hours in a stiff, formal style. On the wedding day itself there is also MUCH more time set aside for photography and we saw many brides having their photos taken well into the night on the Shanghai harbour-side. And this is where we met the lovely Jessie Wang and her new husband. A bride and groom, right in front of the famous Aurora building – it was a cliche opportunity too good to miss. The style is more traditional Chinese than  Aurora Studio and the quality is impaired by the holiday camera we took with us, but we still enjoyed photographing them and hopefully we’ll have given them a wedding memory they’ll look back on with affection.

Debbie and Graham

Debbie and Graham were yet another couple this year who were determined not to let the weather spoil their wedding day. And, of course, it didn’t. Debbie was clearly running on adrenaline and seemed scarcely to notice the biting Northerly wind that howled around the church at Hibaldstow. And inside all was warm – in both the physical and emotional sense – for the ceremony. With lots of close family and numerous children this was always destined to be a wedding that would be emotional – but definitely not quiet!

Forest Pines proved the perfect place for the Reception. Bad weather doesn’t matter here. Forest Pines management have been told our views ( forcefully) lots of times – the buildings are superb, the staff are fantastic, the organisation always spot-on – but the ‘garden’ is a photographer’s nightmare. It’s in full sun almost all day, it is surrounded by not walls and  has a gazebo plonked in the middle to encourage the most uncreative and cliched photography everl

Inside the building, with lovely chrome and glass graphic shapes and dramatic architecture creative opportunities abound and so bad weather is a definite bonus for us. And so too the guests – there was plenty of space for the children to run around, whilst the rest of the guests could mingle freely without feeling in the least claustrophobic or overlooked.

I’m afraid you’re all going to have to wait some time before you see the pics we took. But heck, I’ve never seen as many cameras in my life as there were at this wedding, so I’m sure there will be hundreds of pics posted on facebook and elsewhere. It will be seven weeks before the couple get back from their world travels and allow our pictures to go live for everyone to see, but we promised we’d show just a few if only to prove to Graham that he really ought to sell his Nikon gear and buy a proper camera!