Esme leads every wedding. She shoots quietly, from further away than you expect, on two bodies with fixed lenses so she has to move rather than zoom — which is why she is usually somewhere you had not noticed. Joss Fairweather joined in 2019 from a photography degree in Blackpool and three years of assisting in Manchester. He shoots alongside Esme on every wedding, leads all of the family and newborn sessions, and is the one who talks to the children, mostly by ignoring them for the first quarter of an hour. He also develops the medium-format film by hand in the back room, which he will show you if you ask and possibly if you do not. Maddie Kerr joined in 2021 and runs the studio: she holds the diary, builds the timelines, chases the venues for the details we need, and designs the albums. If you email us on a Tuesday it is Maddie who replies, and she is the reason nothing here has ever been forgotten. Between the three of us we take one wedding a weekend and about thirty family sessions a year, and that ceiling is deliberate — it is the number at which we can still remember your venue without looking it up.

We arrive an hour before you think you need us, because the hour before is when the good frames are. There is no shot list, no Pinterest board and nobody will be asked to walk towards the camera holding hands and laughing at nothing. For most of the day you will forget we are working, which is the entire technique and takes both of us to pull off — one of us close, one of us wide, neither of us in the aisle. We do the group shots properly and quickly: eight groupings, twenty-five minutes, a list agreed a fortnight before and one nominated person per family to round people up. Somewhere near sunset we will steal you for twenty minutes, and if the light that day is better at half past six than at half past eight we will have told you so at the planning call, because that is what the light timeline on this site is for. We stay until the first dance, or until an hour after it if the evening is going somewhere. We do not photograph the tidy version of anything.

Three things, and none of them is a mood board. A running order as early as you have one, even a rough one — we would rather see a draft in March and help you fix the four o’clock problem than see the final version in August when the caterer has already been booked around it. One nominated person per family who knows everybody by sight and is not afraid to raise their voice for twenty-five minutes; this single appointment saves more time on a wedding day than any other decision you will make. And an honest word about anybody we should be careful with: the grandparent who tires by three, the brother who is not speaking to the other brother, the friend who would rather not be photographed at all. We will not put a foot wrong if we know, and we cannot possibly know unless you tell us. Everything else — the timings, the light, where to stand, when to steal you away — is our job, and you should not have to think about any of it after the planning call.