From where she stands, a wedding is eight or nine things, and only two of them are on the running sheet. This is the shape of most days.
She arrives while the room is still a room. Chairs stacked, someone’s father on a ladder, the dress on the back of a door with the light coming under it. Half an hour, nobody in the frame, and by the end of it the place has been photographed as it was built.
Four people, one mirror, and more noise than anywhere else in the day. This is the hour that looks nothing like a wedding and everything like a family. She stays out of the way and shoots at close range, which sounds contradictory and is not.
Somebody is always alone for a moment before it starts, and they are almost never the person you would guess. This is the frame she watches for hardest.
From the back, always. The faces turning is the photograph, and you cannot get it from the front.
Ninety minutes after the ceremony where nothing is scheduled and everything happens. Aunties in the kitchen, children under a table, the two of you finally sitting down. More of your album comes from here than from any other part of the day.
The only ten minutes that cannot be moved. She will take you away from your own party for exactly that long, and she will tell you when it is coming so it does not feel like an ambush.
Shot from the side, at the faces listening, not the person talking. The best photograph during a speech is almost always somebody in the third row.
Available light for as long as the room allows it, and then she will make a decision you will not notice. The last hour of a wedding is the loosest and the most honest, and it is worth staying for.
Every day is different and this one is a composite. Yours will have something in it that is not on this list, and that will probably be the picture you keep.
Tell her about the day