Natalie & Arber

On Saturday 25th September Natalie and Arber married at the Ponsbourne Park Hotel. The venue is a great one stop wedding shop with impressive grounds creating so may great photo opportunities. The joy of this sort of venue is that if we experience horizontal rain and need to use studio lighting, sheltered doorways and umbrellas, we only have to empty the car once. If it's a two or three venue event, then it all has to be unpacked and packed up again (in between sweeping up the confetti from the church steps and getting to the reception to shoot them getting out of the car).

Having everything under one roof where there is ample parking and facilities is a real joy. Sadly it's being knocked down in 2011 and a state of the art training centre is to replace the grand old buildings apparently.

These images were taken by me with Martin Malocco riding in the second seat. Martin covered Rod & Teresa's wedding with me just over a year ago and I'm also to shoot his daughter Maria's wedding to Kevin in September next year with the legendary Marta Demartini from HM Digiart.

Natalie's bridesmaids were predominantly women she'd gone to school with. The sororal networking in the years that have passed since their full time education was evident throughout the day and featured in Natalie's father's speech which reduced several people to tears as well as fits of laughter as he jumped from moving to mirth. After 388 weddings I've heard quite a few speeches but Natalie's dad Brian offered an outstanding performance that people were still enthusing about 5 hours later as I left.

During our consultation earlier this year at their home in Hornsey, North London, the two of them expressed the desire to have a traditional mounted album. It was the first time I've been asked to do this since our transition from film to digital cameras, but within 6 weeks we'd had another two bookings with the bride and grooms also requesting mounted albums. From talking to some of my peers at the Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers It would appear that this trend towards "proper" printed photos in mounted albums is enjoying a resurgence across the UK.

As with most weddings, dancing featured towards the end of the day and an impromptu training session took place on the dance floor between dining courses.

We have always prided ourselves in adding something special for our clients and their guests if we can help. Over the years this has ranged from use of a set of jump leads to start the vintage Daimler that had broken down to sewing up a torn seam on the grooms trousers. On this occasion a couple of the guests had run out of things they needed that the hotel couldn't provide, so after a 7 mile drive and lots of "sorry mate not here" we managed to get what they needed. All part of the service - or as they say at Tesco's who own the property "Every little helps".

A full set of images are available on our TPS web site.