Elvetham Winter Wedding | Maddie & Daniel
With a winter wedding you always wonder if the weather is going to be on your side or not – fortunately for Maddie & Daniel’s special day at The Elvetham in Hampshire the temperature was an unseasonably warm 15C and the sun shone from a clear blue sky most of the time! Some clouds rolled in later on, just in time to give me a dramatic sky for some spectacular sunset pictures – quite handy that!
The Elvetham Hotel near Hook in Hampshire is a superb venue for a wedding – set in 35 acres of grounds the house is a splendid Victorian mansion with elegant rooms and a welcoming, country house feel. Maddie and Dan were such a relaxed and fun couple and their family and friends really got into the spirit of things too so it was a real pleasure to cover their wedding.
Elvetham Winter Wedding: photos in the gardens
After the ceremony we took some photos of Maddie and Dan and their family and guests in the grounds of the Elvetham – I had the pleasure of working with my colleague Graham Nixon on this wedding, so we had it covered from all angles!
The Elvetham’s avenue of yew trees is a deservedly popular location for wedding photos, and on this occasion with the low sun lined up almost perfectly with the avenue of trees it was ideal. The ground was a bit soft underfoot so we did the confetti toss pictures on the terrace.
Maddie and Daniel’s civil ceremony took place in the Oak Room and their wedding breakfast was held in the Conservatory. In between they went for a short drive around the grounds in a classic Bullnose Morris vintage car, which was lots of fun! Dan managed to drive it successfully without crunching the gears too much – those old cars don’t have the slick modern synchronised gearboxes we take for granted nowadays…
After the meal there were of course some speeches – one snag of working in a conservatory after dark as a photographer is that there isn’t a lot of light… We considered using flash but in a fairly small space it would have been distracting and intrusive, so we shot with the light from the candles and downlighters.
Fortunately modern cameras are very sensitive but even so I had to go up to ISO 10000 which is pretty high! That’s why the speeches photos are in black and white – colour doesn’t work so well if there’s very little illumination and the light is orange. Part of my job as a wedding photographer is to decide on these trade-offs – a wedding is not a movie set, so sometimes it’s better to be unobtrusive rather than flood the scene with artificial lighting!
