It was the first time I will have photographed a wedding at The Grove in Hertfordshire so, as with all venues, whether I have been there 20 times or never before I always try and do a couples pre-wedding shoot at the actual venue itself so we get a feel for where the best spots are then on the big day and we know exactly where we are going, it seems to relax the couple as we are all on familiar ground.
Sometimes I visit a venue and there is very little photographically to make it stand out but we still manage to get some stunning shots (I have even photographed a couple in a car park but you would never have known it wasn’t in a gorgeous mansion when I produced the final shots!) the job of the professional photographer is to have the eye and experience to produce something stunning out of nothing. One of the guys I really admire in Wedding Photography is an Australian Award winning photographer Jerry Ghionis

When I was there in Feb this year I had the pleasure of doing the pre-wedding shoot of Anna & Terry who are tying the knot there in August this year.
After being grilled by security as to what I was doing there with a huge camera and 70-200 lens (I think they thought I was part of the Taliban as they had some high level Deutsche Bank conference there!) I met Anna & Terry in reception and we went outside into the walled gardens to do some pictures.
Now I know some people reading this may think this was a set up shoot with 2 models I can assure you it isn’t, just that Anna & Terry are an amazingly photogenic couple and it really was difficult to take a bad picture of them. I was inspired by some images I had seen recently from a fantastic UK photographer Damien Lovegrove that he shot in Amserdam called Passion on the street of Amsterdam and loved the close focus shots where you can only see parts of the face which I think are just SOOO sexy.

The walled gardens in the hotel have a slight “Alice in Wonderland” feel to them with a potting shed (which is hired out for corporate functions!) a brightly painted blue beach hut, an old battered wooden rowing boat and even a small sandy beach with some driftwood, all this a stones throw from Watford!!. The fact that Terry wore a pink jumper and Anna a petrol blue top couldn’t have been better as it combined brilliantly with the coloured beach hut in the shots.

As you can probably tell from the photos we all had great fun doing these shots and I genuinely cannot wait to photography their wedding there in August. I expect to produce something very special as there is so much photographic opportunity there.

My new website and Blog is almost ready to go live but in the meantime please visit my current site to see lots of my wedding photography at The Bridal Photographer