cheap and brilliant wedding photographers do exist

I know. I can't quite believe it either. After being dropped by our wedding photographer friend (thank god, I have calmed down a little now) I didn't know what to do. So I asked Twitter and blogged about it.

And a miracle occurred - the power of crowds and the brilliance of total strangers meant that we got not just one recommendation for photographers, but several. All of them great and reasonably priced and genuinely concerned and helpful. It was humbling, and I can't believe our luck.

After much deliberation we made a decision. It was not an easy choice - as I say - all of the people that found us were great. And after making such a personal appeal, the replies I received were in the same vein - so it was really hard to turn down those who so kindly offered their services and help. I felt bad for doing so, even though we could only pick one person.

I have lots of thank yous to make. Firstly, the retweeters and blog readers who helped spread the word. @Mission2Wed @Cloggins, @Convo_pieces @becca_clare, @VSChinaHire, @knotsandkisses - I hope I've got everyone here, but if I haven't, please message me or leave a comment and I will add you in.

And then, to the photographers who responded. Let me just say right now that if you are looking for a good (nay, great) and reasonably-priced wedding photographer then you need to call these people. On my limited dealings with them, I can also say that these people are willing to go the extra mile and offer personal service. In short - they give a damn:

Katie Byram Photography (@katiebyramphoto)

Jameson Kergozou (@kergozou)

Alex Smith at Mytime Photography (@mytimephoto)

Mirrorbox Photography

And special thanks to the super-stylish Marie Man (you may also know her as @Marnova) for answering lots of questions. And the brilliant Hannah Dornford-May for doing the same.

(Really hoping I haven't missed anyone off. I had to write this post twice due to a crash perfectly timed for the exact moment I pressed 'publish'. If I have, please message me to say. I promise it wasn't intentional!)

One of the above is our wedding photographer - but I'm not going to say who just yet. As I may have mentioned - they are all amazing. I would hate for you to just visit the one link... Go and check them out, and tell your friends.

Thank you, internet, for being so bloody amazing. Hopefully normal service, and blog-posting regularity, can now resume!

photographer blues

So I have been posting a little on Twitter about some stress with the photographer. Avid readers may remember that we had booked a friend to be our photographer. He's what you might call a keen and capable amateur, and he'd done a wedding before.

We went out to see him and discussed what we wanted. We said we loved what he did and we coo-ed over his pics. My initial worries about the unreliability of asking a friend melted away. We looked at all sorts of pics and we decided that a sort of 'reportage' feeling, with a few arty ones, was the way to go. He'd done it before. It was theoretically simple. It would be great fun.

We had an informal document which we agreed on with the style, etc, detailed. All that was left was for him to send a contract - we may be friends, but friendships are lost over not being clear - and as we were paying him (not an insubstantial amount for a friend) - we needed a contract, even a little thing.

In the meantime, I sent the occassional link to nice photos. He responded saying they were nice. I knew he wasn't going to emulate everything I sent - I just thought they were nice and some showed examples of shots that were nice and simple. It was all Nice. Not demanding. We'd already discussed what he'd take - and that was cool.

Five months we waited for a contract. I emailed every few weeks to ask and he replied that it was coming, he was just busy with work etc.

Until last Thursday, when I felt that now the wedding was just a few months off, we should have a contract if that was OK - just as a formality, just in case. And he replied that he'd actually been stalling because he wasn't sure he could give us what we wanted. Even though we'd talked about what we wanted. And agreed on it. And that was FIVE months ago.

So we sent an email reassuring him that we loved what he did, just as it was.

His reply?

You're very kind. I'll think about it over the weekend and let you know.

So today - after chasing for a reply - we got one. He's not sure he can do it and says he wants to pull out. It sounds like he could still be convinced if we really tried, but now I don't want to convince him. I don't want to beg him to do it when he doesn't want to, or for the result to be disappointing and for him to say 'well, I did warn you...'

Most of all, we want someone we can rely on - and who wants to do it. We don't have enough money for a full on professional - that is for sure. And though I've had some good recommendations, the wedding is in Somerset and those recommendations have a long way to travel - making their initially realistic and reasonable quotes somewhat stratospheric.

That's not to say I'm not grateful for the recommendations - please keep them coming - but when I say not much money, I mean definitely not four figures, as nice as those photographers might be. Not even approaching four figures. But a not-insignificant sum, plus travel and somewhere to sleep. Maybe enough for a student, or someone just setting up their business. We will of course feed whoever comes and make sure they have a good time along with everyone else. We just can't drop a grand on pics. And now we are left not knowing what to do.

definitely going to love my dress

If you've arrived here from Love My Dress today then welcome!

Today I have officially been announced as the winner of the Love My Dress and House of Mooshki competition to win a dream wedding dress - made to any design I like.

I still can't believe it - I am over the moon and feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

Thank you Love My Dress and House of Mooshki! More updates to follow...

here's what you could have won

Today, a blog I love wrote a post that crystallised thoughts I've been having for a while. Thoughts about how much we manage to torture ourselves in the name of weddings.

The post I am referring to is this one, from the brilliant a Los Angeles Love. Becca at LAL is having a cool as hell wedding, with a DJ they love and food trucks and plants on the table and a lovely dress - and they are doing all of it between the two of them. Essentially it sounds like a massive party with a wedding at the centre, which is a model we are certainly aspiring to. Every time, I read this blog I find my confidence growing.

But today's post was all about the wobbles. About 'what the wedding won't be.' There won't be paper pom poms and bits of ephemera to photograph, and this bothers Becca, as it has bothered many of us in the past, myself included. There's a lot of justification for what there will not be and it reads like a post where she is rather exorcising these images from her brain. Begone, Martha Stewart! Get your stinking crafts out of my face! I'll do as I damn well please!

It's a sentiment I can get behind. I've felt it myself - weddingprettyoverload. The 'if I see another 1970s-tinted picture of a beautiful thin girl standing in an arty room looking wistful and showing us her shoes i am going to goddamn scream' feeling. That's not to say I don't like this stuff.

But my point is this - if even Becca, who is having a cool as hell wedding and showing people like me how to be confident - if even this lady gets these wobbles, then why? Who is torturing us? Who is forcing these pictures down our throats? Who is telling us that if we don't have crepe paper pom poms and artfully sourced bit of vintage then we will not be pretty enough? I am having a bit of a rerun of the end of this post, where I feel like the consumption of wedding magazines and blog is harming my sense of perspective.

Of course, the answer is that it is us. We are doing this to ourselves - we are reading the posts about the weddings of others and every time we do so, we mourn a little bit for the wedding we aren't going to have.

It is a form og torture - we are making ourselves feel a little more insignificant and going a little crazier every day. We know we can't do it all but all we do is make a decision and then challenge it, repeatedly, by looking at 'what we could have won' (wow, worked a 'Bullseye' reference into a wedding blog).

When we took our parents to see the venue, both sets said the same thing: we wish we could have been married somewhere like this. But neither of them were. One set married in a church hall a few weeks after one partner's redundancy (and cancelling almost EVERYTHING) and the other set married in a war zone. They had no pom poms, no luxury of months of organising, poring over blogs and magazines. They just did it with what they had, which is all you can do. Part of me feels embarrassed by the riches of time and choice at our disposal. We've got to find other ways to fill it than by torturing ourselves.

We do what we do, and we do it because that's us. That's it.

wonderstuff #1

I'm not really one for smearing lots of gunk on my face, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I'm lucky - I inherited skin that lets me be lazy. Most of the time, it's ok - I just have the same problems/problem areas as most people. I've always cleansed, moisturised - but there are stubborn areas.

Eating well cleared up a huge number of skin issues (another thing to thank Slimming World for!) However, as part of the same 'playing at being a grown up' drive that has recently seen me buying my first leather handbag and renouncing £2.99 make up, I decided that I should sort my skin out properly, with the wedding as an ultimate goal.

Over recent months I have discovered these two little beauties: one for problems, one for all round improvement.




This slightly industrial looking tube is truly brilliant stuff. Vichy's 'normaderm nuit' is, to translate the beauty-ese, stuff you use overnight that makes your dodgy bits calm down nicely. It doesn't dry out like witch hazel but slowly, over a few days/weeks, you realise your chin/nose are clear and lovely. Great stuff.




This is the second lovely thing. Soap & Glory 'make yourself youthful rejuvenating face serum'. I'd been looking out for a serum after a free sample of some amazingly expensive stuff convinced me that it was a good thing. Also I turned 28 and birthdays always make me buy this sort of stuff. However - most serums I saw were way out of my price range. Then I saw this and tried it out.

It smells AMAZING - like chocolate orange - and I think the orangeyness has some sort of freshening/removing dead cells effect on your skin. All I know is that it feels great and smells amazing and that after two days of using it, J said: "what have you done to your face? It looks...I dunno... Sort of rosier, but all over. Not red rosy, just sort of...bright...good..." which is about as resounding an approval as I have ever had.

three stones

(source)

So, in the final Slimming World weigh in before Christmas, I hit a milestone. Or a mile-three-stone, as you may have guessed from the genius image above. It's funny, reading back to things like this post, when I'd just lost one stone, and thinking back to those first few weeks when I felt sure it wasn't going to work because everyone around me was losing at double the speed.

Truth be told, I'd hoped to be at four stones gone by now, but I am very happy to have hit three. I'd aimed for 1lb a week, making four stones in a year, but life does sometimes get in the way. But I lost this weight still going out for meals, still drinking, still enjoying myself, still eating bread, potatoes, rice and pasta, as well as all other foods. This now means that I've become a mad evangalist for Slimming World. Every time I hear about someone doing some daft diet I just want to shake them and tell them about doing it sensibly. But people won't believe you can do it without hardship, no matter what you tell them.

My aim is now to be 12-stones something by the time I look for a dress. That's another two stones or so off. I'm supposed to do it by March. Wish me luck...

writing the ceremony and the any campaign

Tis the season to neglect your blog, tra la la la laaa etc etc etc.

What can I say? It's almost-Christmas, and this means my early morning blog-writing slots have been taken up with planning parties, emailing friends regarding annual Christmas meet ups; buying invitation-making stationery items (helloo Martha Stewart paper punches) and investigating wedding cake options.

So today, we see our ceremony-conducting friend again, but this time not for a gig or dinner or at the pub. Tonight, we are having him round to ours for wine and takeaway and to talk about the wedding - ie, the ceremony, and what we might write.

It's at his instigation too - had he not suggested that it was probably time to do it, we might have procrastinated until we had a week to go. But he's got 'ideas' he says, and given that by the time Christmas and the New Year are over, we'll be just eight months away (HOLY CRAP), he's definitely right to make us start now. I don't think this will be sorted tonight.

We've got some suggestions from the various websites, but christ, is it hard to know where to begin. I like elements of the traditional ceremony and given that people think we're mad hippy pagans for holding the wedding on the top of a hill as it is, I think that having some of this structure will reassure some of those present.

We're also keen to avoid cringeyness - so we won't be inviting people to sing anything en masse I've not got experience of this ever properly working out. At least in a church people expect to have hymns but on a hill? Hmn. I don't think our guests are the type to burst out in spontaneous unaccompanied song. So some vague structure, no cringeing. That's all we have right now.

The ceremony presents logistical problems too. For example: music. We've got some songs in mind, but how do we get them played up on a hill with no electricity? Anyway, this is not Ceremony Friend's problem (it's the Best Man/Musical Director's. No, really! He's on the case.)

So here it goes. ACTUAL MARRIAGE STUFF is happening TONIGHT. Not cake, not make up, not bunting. Actual words that make us married. Well, not technically. This technically happens at 10.15am when most people will still be in bed, and we leg it off to the register office.

And on that subject, you may notice the lovely bluey-yellow button at the top right of this page. This is my indication of support for the Any Campaign.

This is a wonderful petition that highlights the madness that is English marriage law. Currently, you can't get married outside or in an unregistered building. Why? No one seems to be able to justify this ludicrous law. And it doesn't apply in Scotland, so it's clearly possible to get rid of it without the foundations of society crumbling away.

Anyway - go there, sign the petition and if you have a blog, pop the button on there and let them know. And maybe one day, your children will be able to have a mad hippy/pagan/traditional wedding on top of a beautiful hill.