Maddie sends one email four weeks after the gallery lands. It asks three questions and they are deliberately awkward: was there a moment you wish we had been closer to, did either of us get in the way at any point, and would you have paid what you paid again knowing what you know now. The answers come to all three of us unedited and we read every one. They have changed how we work more than once — we moved from three group-shot lists to one agreed a fortnight ahead because four separate couples said the same thing about the confusion; we started sending the sneak peek within four days rather than ten because one bride said the wait was the only bad part of the whole experience; and we stopped photographing the cake unless asked, because it turns out nobody has ever looked at that photograph twice. Since 2016 we have photographed 184 weddings and about two hundred and seventy family sessions. Eleven couples have booked us a second time for a christening or a family session, four families have now been photographed by us three years running, and two couples we photographed in 2017 have since had us do their children. Those are the numbers we watch, because a wedding photographer only gets asked back if the photographs turned out to be the ones people actually live with rather than the ones that looked best the week they arrived.