We only publish a client’s photograph or quote with their written permission, asked for at the time and never assumed. Several of the letters in our archive folder are from clients who asked specifically not to be named or pictured online, and we have kept every one of those requests for as long as we have kept the letters that said yes. If you have sat for us and would rather your images were never used in our marketing, one line in an email is all it takes, and we will update our records the same day. We take the same care with the archive: a restoration client’s damaged photograph is never shown publicly, before or after repair, unless they have explicitly said we may.

Ludlow Castle, most often — its gatehouse arch appears in more of our wedding albums than any other single backdrop, including our own studio. We have also shot weddings at Stokesay Court, in barns across Herefordshire, and twice, memorably, in gardens during weather Constance still describes diplomatically as "characterful". Every wedding album we deliver includes at least one frame the couple did not expect to love, which is usually our favourite one too. Idris keeps a private list of his own favourite frames from each year, and every December the studio prints the best of them onto a single contact sheet that hangs, unofficially, above the kettle.

The archive folder itself is a modest thing — a green box file, refilled twice as it wore out, sitting on the shelf above Ben’s desk. It holds perhaps four hundred letters and cards, sorted by decade rather than alphabetically, since nobody ever agreed on a better system and by now it feels wrong to change it. Reading through it, as Constance occasionally does on a slow afternoon, is the closest thing the studio has to a written history — better, in some ways, than the negatives themselves, since a photograph shows a face but a letter tells you what the sitting meant to the person in it.

Every review and every photograph on this page came with the client’s knowledge that it might appear here — we ask at the time, not months later when the memory of agreeing has faded. Letters from the paper archive, some older than either photographer currently on staff, are used only where the client (or, for the oldest ones, a direct descendant we have been able to trace) has confirmed they are happy to be quoted. It is slower than simply publishing everything flattering that lands on the desk, but it is the only way we know to keep sixty-eight years of goodwill intact.