My Best Wedding Photography from 2020 - What a Crazy Year!

What a year to be a wedding photographer!

Wow, 2020… one hell of a year to be a wedding photographer, or should that be one hell year of being a wedding photographer?! Okay, okay, it definitely wasn’t hell…not all of it at least, but where do I start?!? After a crazy-busy 2019 photographing epic weddings, with all shooting and editing wrapped up for the year, I’d planned 3 months off over winter to head off to India and South Africa to enjoy sometime shooting documentary photography on my travels before what was scheduled to be a crazy-busy 2020 wedding season, it was THE year to get married. Whilst in India trickles of Covid19 news started to hit the headlines, but by the time I returned to the U.K. in February it was still only something happening elsewhere. I shot my first wedding of the year for Dawn and Graham - their big day forms the start of my slideshow, in late February…wedding receptions were still big, parties were messy, hugs were unbridled and aplenty - remember that? By the time I flew to South Africa in March things suddenly spiralled to the extent that I ended up having to arrange an emergency flight out of SA to get back to the U.K. before South Africa went into lockdown. On the way back from the mountains to the airport, within the space of 5 hours, 7 weddings disappeared from my calendar, my couple’s hearts were breaking in all the confusion. I stood in the doorway of a service station en route and cried. It felt like my entire business and livelihood as a wedding photographer was crumbling before my eyes, and at this point, that I was about to walk right into a Zombie Apocalypse when I returned home into lockdown. The peak of the Coronavirus pandemic hit, weddings taking place were banned, email after email from devastated couples poured in, it sucked for everyone and some days I wanted to just turn it all off and go and sit in the woods. So I did. And then got back to it, keeping hope alive. The sun shone, I fell in love, I lost 75% of my income and a big chunk of my identity wrapped up with being a wedding photographer, missed my friends and family like crazy, and rallied with my lovely clients as we worked against ever changing restrictions and photographed another 7 weddings in 2020. 7 beautiful micro-weddings; some with 30 people, some 15, some postponed twice, some postponed thrice, some shifted with days to spare to beat new restrictions and some scraping in by the skin of their teeth. Each and every wedding I photographed was magical, special and will stay with me a long time. The stress and uncertainty that my couple’s had faced had meant we had spent far more time than usual talking, chatting, figuring things out and forming what felt like a friendship so that by the time I came to photograph each and every one of these very special, intimate wedding days, it filled me with utter joy to finally see them able to get married. It really brought home the power of love, the importance of family and the true meaning behind marriage. It also reiterated to my, by that stage, rather worn-out soul, that photographing weddings is the career for me. Those 8 weddings made my year, so thank you. And thank you to every single one of my gorgeous couples from 2020 who had to go through the stress, uncertainty and trauma of having to postpone, face nail-biting waits and even have to cancel their wedding days. It was a year far beyond anything any of us could image and many times did I curse the day I used to reassure myself when going self-employed “there will always being weddings, people will never stop getting married”. But, it’s true! 8 newlyweds emerged from my 2020. We made it through to a New Year and after a hard winter, 2021 will be full of hope, joy, laughter, hugs, dancing and most importantly of all - love.