It's August 2024, I've just photographed by 502nd wedding and I'm taking a rare day off, so I thought I'd double check that the images on my website all have some story behind them (when I say story I mean the image caption that you're reading here.) It came as quite a surprise that for one of my most popular images (according to the number of likes on instagram that is (and I hate that that's a thing)) doesn't have any writing to go with it.
In 2021, once weddings had started to fire back up post-covid, one of the biggest new ideas in wedding photography was the use of smoke bombs or smoke grenades/canisters. Naturally, like everything else in life, I was quite late to the party and didn't *really* see the point - to me, my job as a wedding photographer has always been capturing the natural moments as they occur, and the emotion that goes with them. At no (or at very few) point(s) in my career have I said 'here, hold this for a photo' so the notion of handing someone something hot, potentially dangerous and full of colourful smoke was a little out-there. When people bring their own smoke bombs to a wedding, it's a slightly different story in that it would have happened whether I was there or not.
I get that I'm beginning to ramble.
Anyone who has spent any time looking at my work or my website will know that I like to take the occasional 'big picture' usually at night, sometimes in the rain and sometimes using architecture. Almost always using off-camera flash that's remotely controlled. Here's a somewhat popular image of mine, taken in the same location as the shot above, with a swarm of bugs flying through the background (that no one had any idea was there)
So for the image this caption is for, I decided to try something new again. I'd have a budding volunteer, a wedding guest, pull the pin on a smoke grenade once I had positioned the bride and groom where I wanted them, and set the flash up too. The guest then ran side to side, the length of the tree-lined avenue, filling it with thick pink smoke. I had remembered to pre-focus on the couple before the smoke arrived, otherwise it would have been a lot of literal hot air, for nothing.
I do love quite a lot about the image with the pink smoke. Firstly, it's totally different to most uses of wedding smoke bombs that you see. I love that the couple are a perfect silhouette and I love the tiny amount of light poking through between them.
When I originally posted this image on Instagram, I said it had a 'Beauty and the Beast' feel to it (meaning magical, Disney-like etc.) I was certainly not suggesting the groom was a beast! (Sorry Doug.)
Location: The Wood Norton Hotel, Evesham.
Keywords: Photographer-directed image (128).