Winter Wedding at Rye Church

Winter wedding Rye Church, then Bannatynes in Hastings

This lovely, Christmas themed wedding was on December 23rd and so was my last wedding of 2014.

Back in June, I photographed Chloe and Stephen in Rye and then Camber sands for their engagement shoot.

Every wedding has things that make it special and this was no exception. I was told in confidence of two surprises. Firstly as Chloe is a dance teacher, her mother had organised a ballet styled guard of honour for their church exit procession. This is really unique for a wedding, especially a winter wedding and they really did excel at it - see the picture. I was really impressed by the ballet poses, the superb floral displays and how patient the ballerina girls were, while they waited for the bride and groom to exit the church.

The second surprise was during the wedding breakfast. Unknown to anyone but the bride and groom, they had hired some singing waiters. Their performance ranged from singing (of course), to guitar playing, a few comical mini speeches, and even a bit of acrobatics - see picture.

Another interesting feature was the sparklers - see photo. It’s works particularly well for winter weddings where there is more dark than light outside, and they brought many of the guests outside for the picture. From a photographic point of view this is the sort of scenario that flash would have produced a very different picture but I wanted a natural look using the light given by the sparklers. Due to me choosing a very high ISO (camera setting, in this case ISO 25,600), there is quite a lot of grain on the picture, but I feel this doesn’t detract from the overall ambience of the image. In fact I think the grain adds to the ambiance.

Whilst the sparklers were out I suggested that the bride and groom spent a couple more minutes doing a bit of light painting with them. This is where they draw their initials with the sparklers, and I slow the camera shutter with down to (in this case), 2 seconds. Over that time, the camera sees the culmination of the light and so the their initials appear. Magic!

On a very different note, after all my engagement shoots and weddings in Rye in 2014, it was particularly interesting to watch the BBC TV drama Mapp and Lucia. For those who don’t know it was set in Rye and many of the scenes were set in the area around the church, Market Street and Church Square.