I genuinely love all the pictures I take, every one has purpose and meaning.
Quite a few people do ask me if I have a favourite and my answer is yes, yes I do. It’s a picture that won’t ever see the public light of day though.
It’s a seemingly ordinary picture, a girl smiling, the kind of smile that really reaches the eyes, a glimpse of pure happiness that given the fact it’s a picture of someone at a wedding it shouldn’t really be that ‘special’. After all, getting pictures of people smiling at weddings is rather easy, everyone’s smiling.
The reason is this, she was a young flower girl with ADHD, she suffered terribly with being around groups of people and looked terrified whenever there was more than one person around her. The pressure of the day and break in normal routine was probably very distressing. God knows how she must have felt but she wanted to be a flower girl really badly.
She spent most of the day withdrawn inside herself, at one point she was sat quietly on her own when one of the other flower girls came and sat beside her, she just sat there next to her, passed her a small cocktail umbrella and smiled at her. She took it, looked at the other girl and they both sat there smiling, twirling the umbrellas between their fingers, no-one else saw the private little moment between the two girls or the beaming smiles, but there’s a picture of it - and that’s the favourite wedding picture I’ve taken and probably ever will.
Seemingly ordinary moments, ordinary pictures meaning much much more to those who know the subjects in them - that’s what I strive for at each wedding, stories about people.