Adeloa and Aniru

On Friday 1st October 2010 - Nigeria's 50th anniversary of independence day, Adeola Ramsay and Aniru Shyllon tied the knot at St Mary Magdalene in Enfield Middlesex. Reverend Gordon Giles runs a tight ship up there in Windmill Hill but his service was so very relevant to the future lives of this lovely couple.

What I've been careful to do for the blog is use images only taken inside - which most of them were. At the times most of these images were taken the wind speed was 18 MPH and from 11:00 until midnight we had a pretty solid downpour of rain. Of course a soggy day wasn't going to stop the wedding or diminish any of the love that Adeloa and Aniru have for one another, but it was a shame that the grounds of the church and hotel were out of bounds due to horizontal rain.

Church entrances, arches, doorways, coves and green bridges almost always provide a bit of shelter with great light for images even in the rain, just like this one above of the bridesmaids.

My two lovely accomplices Sarah and Nedine (below) were given the opportunity to shoot from the bell tower and the view (above) was what they had to look at. It's a tough old job being a photographer you know. Actually taking the images is usually the best bit because it's fun and what we like doing best.

What clients rarely see is the hours of work that follows ...backing up images, clearing out the shots that don't work (flash didn't fire/granddad walked into shot as it was taken etc) then arranging them in some form of viewable package, be it proof book, slide show or disc of images, then the blog, website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, press releases, follow ups to the 20 emails given to you by the guests, the design, editing, clearing up of albums, thank you cards, recharging batteries, replacing and reformatting memory cards, sending back up discs to a remote locale. "Archives are lost via three main methods - Fire, Flood and Theft" (source Tony Benn's diaries, albeit he was quoting someone else when he wrote this). So the images are safe and have been dispatched for the perusal of the bride and groom and the next day it all starts again. I wouldn't have it any other way, but I could do with a months worth of lessons on how to do things better on the computer (like throw the thing out of the window sometimes).

Anyway - because of the late running of the day and more relevant, the weather - we set up theBowens kit in a lovely huge space in the Royal Chase Hotel. The staff at the hotel were fantastic and it was a breath of fresh air to work alongside friendly people who had clearly been really well trained. Decent customer attention always gets a recommendation from me. 5* venue and the grub was great too.

The idea of the mini studio was for couples and groups of up to five to have a picture taken using proper studio lighting and backdrops. We rarely do this at weddings as the grounds of the venue normally allows for use of props with natural light. Adeola was ready to party now the speeches and other formalities were out of the way, but she let us grab this one before she went off dancing. A much greater selection as always is on our web site, but you'll need a password from Adeloa or Aniru to be able to see them. They're at TPS Photos Adeola & Aniru.