This is my first opportunity to share some Connaught Hotel Wedding Photography with you.
On paper, this wedding should have been a doozey to photograph. A beautiful, classic London venue, a gorgeous bride, a handsome groom and a beautiful day. Alas, things are never quite that easy in wedding photography :-).
The Connaught Hotel is a lovely venue, and the ceremony room was beautifully decorated in soft pinks. When I photographed it before the ceremony, the room’s window was throwing in some lovely light from the sunny day outside. The room does have extensive interior lighting, and with all the lights turned up, as it was before the ceremony, there is plenty of light here for a photographer to use. Gorgeous!
Unfortunately the venue’s wedding co-ordinator decided just before the ceremony to turn all the lights WAY down, to create what he called “an atmosphere”. I tried to explain to him that photography is the capture of light and that it would be in the bride and groom’s interested to turn the lights up a bit more, but all he said was “sheesh, I’m always having this discussion with photographers” and swanned off. I didn’t get a chance to tell him there was a good reason why photographers generally don’t recommend turning all the lights off! By the time the ceremony started, all that lovely sunshine from outside had moved around the building, so there was only little light coming through the window, but still it was enough to create a huge contrast between the front of the room and the back. Even Tommy, the lovely Westminster registrar said “oh my, it’s dark in here” when he arrived 🙂
Still, as a professional you deal with what’s there, so, on with the show. And this is one of the reasons why you need a professional photographer at your wedding!
The groom was a little camera shy, and kept disappearing before the ceremony, and the bride was a little late, so by the time the ceremony was finished, we were running a little behind. The room for the couple’s drinks reception was just beautiful, though sadly it had no windows, no natural light at all, and the venue had gone for some more “atmospheric” setting on the light that was there, so I was delighted when we got the chance to head outside for our groups photographs into what was a lovely bright summer’s day outside. For the bride and groom portraits we headed into the hotel’s contemporary interior Japanese mini-garden, which came highly recommended by the venue coordinator. Having seen the garden, I had all sorts of ideas of cool photos we could do in there, but by the time we finally got to our portraits, it was early evening and the light had changed. Ideally I would’ve loved to have headed back out into the sunshine for some more shots after that, but the groom preferred to go back to mingling and it was time for me to go, so I just managed to grab one quick shot of the bride and groom having a private moment as I was leaving.
And still, I’m delighted with the end result. Here’s what we got, despite the light and time being against us.
