We were invited to a family wedding on the new year's eve of 2026. We drove up the day before and stayed at a Premier Inn, visiting my sister and her family in Basildon that evening. I hadn't seen her for about 20 years but it felt like a month ago.
The wedding started the next day at 9.00 in the morning and finished late that night. Then, leaving early the next day, the long drive back to Devon.
We had waited for this event for a long time and it did not disappoint - it was a fabulous day, our hosts graciously welcomed us into their community. My congratulations to the bride, the groom and their families.
Copies of these photographs
All photographs and videos were taken in colour, including the audio-visual above. I am happy to provide high resolution copies of any photograph you see, just let me know which one and I will send the colour original.
For fellow photographers
Our invite was sent in plenty of time and I knew exactly what I wanted to do as a photographer at this event; all black & white, mixed still and moving image. I'd spent most of the year trying to get a small video rig together using an external Samsung SSD (990 PRO with Heatsink PCIe 4.0 M.2), an external 3200mAh battery and a couple of Sennheiser MKE 200 Microphones.
Connecting the microphones to my Sigma fp L became so problematic I gave up on the idea - maybe a story for my blog one day.
I had two of those batteries fully charged and one attached to the bottom of the camera (via a dummy battery) with no problems at all. I attached my new external SSD the day before leaving, to test it. The camera could not see it. I tried different USB-C cables, tried connecting it to my computer - nothing could see it (Disk Doctor did once and then it went again).
So no external microphones, no external storage, only an external battery and the internal SD card. The day of the wedding started well but within an hour my camera told me the SD card was full and it really shouldn't have been. When I took it out to replace it with my spare, it fell apart revealing its internals. About 20 minutes later the battery ran dry; turns out one of the two charging ports on the battery charger hadn't been working.
At this point I'm left with my back-up memory card and one external battery and I needed those to last the entire day - they did last and they worked well, I lost nothing.
Except I did lose the correct exposure as I had set my camera's ISO rating to too high a bias for speed over aperture. The Setting for;
ISO Auto Settings [STILL]/Slowest Shutter Speed Limit/
I normally set to Auto. However the room was dark so I decided to up it to Auto (Fast) but mistakenly set it to Auto (Faster). The result was many photographs were underexposed, bereft of detail in the shadows and very contrasty. Fortunately I took plenty of shots and had enough to work with to satisfy myself with the above audio-visual. But I did lose some nice portrait photographs as I found them to be unpublishable. So if you don't see an image you saw me shoot - this may be the reason why it's not seen here, my apologies.
