Two days, two ceremonies and one brilliant North Yorkshire wedding
I am a BIG fan of how Hester and Chris chose to do their wedding. A legal ceremony followed by an absolutely stunning Oswaldkirk Marquee wedding.
Instead of trying to cram everything into one day, they split the celebrations across the weekend.
On Friday, they had their legal ceremony at York Register Office, with their closest family there to make everything official.
Then on Saturday, it was back to Hester’s family home in beautiful Oswaldkirk, North Yorkshire, for the full shebang.
A marquee. A completely personal ceremony. Live music. Five siblings with jobs to do. A brilliant crowd. And a wedding that felt completely like them.
Basically, all the things I love.
A York Register Office wedding before the main celebration
Hester and Chris legally married at York Register Office on the Friday, and I joined them to photograph it.
There’s something really lovely about splitting the legal bit from the bigger celebration. It takes away the pressure of having to fit absolutely everything into one day and means you can make each part feel completely different.
Their Friday ceremony was small and relaxed, and it also gave me the chance to meet some of their family before Saturday’s celebrations began.
That turned out to be one of my favourite things about photographing both days.
By the time I arrived in Oswaldkirk on Saturday, I wasn’t walking into a wedding full of strangers. I already knew people. They knew me. Everyone was that little bit more relaxed around the camera.
And for the way I photograph weddings, that is absolute gold.
A marquee wedding at the family home in Oswaldkirk
I bloody love a marquee wedding at home. There’s something about celebrating somewhere that already means something to you that makes a wedding feel even more personal. You’re not choosing between someone else’s wedding packages or working around what a venue normally does. You can create the day you actually want.
Of course, the flip side is that somebody has to organise it all. When you have a wedding at home, you are essentially building your own wedding venue from scratch, but Hester had a genius solution to this. She has five siblings, so she gave them all a job.
And boy did they deliver. The whole family pulled together to create an absolute belter of a wedding in the grounds of the family home, with a marquee ready for the party and a day that felt personal from beginning to end.
A wedding ceremony that actually felt like Hester and Chris
Because the legal ceremony had already happened the day before, Saturday’s ceremony could be whatever Hester and Chris wanted it to be, which is something I absolutely love about doing things this way.
There is no rule saying your wedding ceremony has to follow a particular formula. If you want to do the legal bit quietly the day before and then gather everyone you love for a completely personal ceremony somewhere meaningful to you, you absolutely can. Your wedding doesn’t have to look like anybody else’s and, in my experience, weddings are generally better when they don’t.
Hester and Chris had already done the official part. Saturday was simply about celebrating their marriage with their people, exactly how they wanted to.
Live music, a brilliant crowd and plenty going on
Give me a wedding with live music and guests who are properly up for it and I am happy. This was one of those weddings where there was always something happening somewhere, and that is exactly what I want as a photographer.
I’m far more interested in what your guests are doing than spending half an hour rearranging your table decorations for photographs. The hugs, the ridiculous conversations, kids doing their own thing, someone absolutely committing to the dance floor, your parents laughing with people they haven’t seen for years, your mates behaving exactly as you knew they would. That’s the good stuff.
Hester and Chris had such a great crowd around them and, because I’d already met a lot of them the previous day, everyone was comfortable with me being there. I could just get stuck in and photograph what was actually happening.
Why I love photographing marquee weddings in North Yorkshire
Marquee weddings give you so much freedom. You can choose your own suppliers, create your own timeline, bring in the food you actually want to eat, have the band you really want and decorate the whole thing however you like. You can stay outside for as long as the Yorkshire weather allows and there’s often much less of that feeling of having to do something at a certain time simply because that’s how the venue normally runs weddings.
When the marquee is at a family home, there’s another layer to it too because the place itself becomes part of the story. Years later, you can look at a photograph and know exactly where it was taken. The garden you grew up playing in, the field behind your parents’ house, the front door everyone came through or the view you’ve known forever. You simply don’t get that from every wedding venue.
Yes, marquee weddings can require a bit more planning, but when they’re done well they are SO good.
Relaxed wedding photography without turning your wedding into a photoshoot
Weddings like this are exactly why I photograph the way I do. Hester and Chris hadn’t created this incredible weekend so that I could whisk them away from it for two hours of couple portraits. They wanted to actually be there, with their family and friends, listening to the music, having a drink and enjoying the wedding they’d put so much work into creating.
I’ll always make time for a handful of lovely photographs of the two of you together, but we don’t need hours. Give me 15 minutes, some decent light and two people who are very happy to be married, then get back to your mates.
For the rest of the day, I’m looking for everything happening around you. The reactions you didn’t see, the people you love having a brilliant time and all the little moments that you couldn’t possibly have noticed while you were busy actually getting married. Those are the photographs that tell you what your wedding really felt like.
Planning a marquee wedding at home in North Yorkshire?
If you’re planning a marquee wedding at your family home, on a farm, in a field, or basically anywhere you’ve decided to turn into a wedding venue for the weekend, I would love to hear about it.
Especially if your priorities are good people, good music and actually enjoying your wedding rather than spending half of it posing for photographs.
I photograph weddings across North Yorkshire, York and beyond with a relaxed, candid and people-first approach. Your wedding is not a photoshoot. You get to enjoy it, and I’ll photograph what happens.
