Right at the end of a Muslim Indian wedding ceremony ( the ‘Nikah’) is the farewell of the bride. This is usually a very emotional time, and often involves a lot of crying as she leaves her family, here the bride is led out by her husband, the Quran is held over her head and her family say tearful goodbyes as she starts her new life. Usually the newly married bride and groom go outside get in the car and drive off together.

The recent Indian wedding of Tia & Ray was an amazing ceremony to document and the change from the sheer emotion of the tears of joy in the ceremony to the tears of emotion at the end really did hit me hard at the end when the farewell of the bride happened. I was shooting in near complete darkness on one camera with ambient light but there was not enough light for my cameras to even focus even at 12,800 ISO and f1.8 on a 50mm lens so I had to resort to switching to flash on my other camera body and that is where I captured this final image which I really love as it really captures the emotion of the beautiful Indian bride as she leaves for her new life.