Abbi & Dave’s Wedding
Saturday 16 July 2016 · Broadstairs, Kent
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 · XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR · 34.2mm · f/2.8 · 1/80 s · ISO 640
Abbi and Vanessa work together, which is how we came to be invited to the wedding: a Saturday in July in Broadstairs, the Church of St Peter in Thanet, a reception at North Foreland Golf Club. The day could not have arranged better weather — 25°C, not a drop of rain, visibility across the Channel running to thirty miles and a light westerly that did nothing to interrupt proceedings. A July wedding in east Kent is always something of a gamble with the forecast, but this one paid off entirely.
I spent the morning at the house of Abbi's parents, not far from the church, while Abbi got ready. It is the part of a wedding day that most photographers treat as a warmup, a collection of expected pictures before the real business begins, and it is also the part where the more interesting photographs often present themselves when you are not pressing for them. The mirror shot above was one of those: Abbi looking sideways at her reflection rather than directly into the lens, the clock just visible at the base of the frame, the window behind soft with morning light. The reflection gives you the face in focus while the back of her head fills the near foreground slightly out of focus at the bottom right — a natural consequence of the geometry, and one that the f/2.8 aperture does nothing to resist.
It was during the conversations over that morning that I discovered a pleasing coincidence: Abbi's father had worked for Fujifilm. The camera in my hands was a Fujifilm X-Pro 2. I had not known this beforehand, and it seemed the kind of detail that should be noted, even if it changes nothing about the photographs themselves.
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 · XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR · 33.2mm · f/2.8 · 1/800 s · ISO 200
The church of St Peter in Thanet stands in Church Street at the centre of what was, for most of its history, the more significant of the two settlements that now form Broadstairs. St Peter's was established around 1070 as a daughter church of Minster-in-Thanet — the second to be founded — and for several centuries the village that grew around it was a busy farming community rather than a seaside resort, while the fishing hamlet of Bradstow to the east was only beginning to find its feet. By the 19th century the balance had inverted: Broadstairs grew rapidly with the arrival of visitors and the railway, and St Peter's was absorbed into the larger town, though the church itself retained its position as the parish church for the whole district until 1850. During the Napoleonic Wars the tower served as a naval signalling station, and the church retains the right to fly the white ensign in recognition of that service.
Church Street runs down from the village green to connect with the rest of Broadstairs, and it was along this pavement — beside the old flint wall of the churchyard — that the bridesmaids arrived. Three of them, Abbi's nieces, in white tiered dresses, one carrying a small posy, walking in a loose line with a parent following behind. The Church Street sign is fixed to the wall just to the left of the nearest girl, which places the image precisely without any effort to make it do so. At 1/800s in good summer light the motion is arrested cleanly — the slight forward lean of the nearest girl, the varying expressions of the three of them, each apparently doing their own thing within the general direction of travel.
The church interior, visible in the aisle photograph that follows, shows what a Victorian restoration did with a Norman shell: a painted and decorated chancel arch, carved woodwork in the pews and fittings, a stained glass east window. About eighty people were gathered inside for the ceremony.
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 · XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR · 21.3mm · f/2.8 · 1/80 s · ISO 1000
The moment after the ceremony — when the couple turn and begin the walk back down the aisle — is the one that most reliably produces a useful photograph, because the work is already done and the smiles arrive naturally. Abbi is carrying an armful of roses that fills the lower centre of the frame; Dave is beside her, and they are both looking ahead at the people they are about to reach rather than at the camera, which gives the image a candour that posed shots tend to lack. The decorated chancel arch recedes behind them, the stained glass east window a bright point in the centre distance. The ISO had to climb to 1000 to manage the interior light, but the X-Pro 2 handles that nicely.
The reception was at North Foreland Golf Club, a clifftop links course established in 1903 on the headland above the North Foreland lighthouse. The lighthouse itself — rebuilt in 1793 on foundations dating from 1691 — marks the most easterly point of Kent, where the Thames Estuary meets the North Sea and the shipping lanes that run between them carry enough traffic to justify the name most mariners still use: the most dangerous corner of the English coast. The golf club sits above all of that, with views east across the water and south towards Ramsgate. It has been used as a Final Qualifying course for the Open Championship, which suggests the clifftop wind does not always confine itself to making weddings pleasant.
The afternoon and evening passed in the way that a well-organised summer wedding tends to: food, speeches, dancing, the light holding until well past nine. A long July day on the Kent coast leaves a great deal of room for an occasion to unfold at its own pace.
Fujifilm X-Pro 2 · XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR · 28.3mm · f/8.0 · 1/125 s · ISO 320
The last image was taken outside the church after the ceremony, in the churchyard, with the flint and ivy of the church wall behind. Abbi is surrounded by friends, one of whom has raised an iPhone for a selfie — the cascade of roses still in one hand, her gaze directed upward at the phone screen. It is a thoroughly contemporary image in some ways, the act of the selfie having become as instinctive a response to a significant moment as reaching for a camera once was, and it also makes a good companion to the mirror photograph that opens the post: in both cases the image involves a reflection of some kind, a captured version of the day being made in the middle of the day itself.
It was, from a photographer's point of view, a straightforward commission made easier by the subjects. Abbi and Dave are a great-looking couple, relaxed in front of the lens throughout, and the guests were largely unconcerned by the camera's presence after the first hour. The church offered a more complex lighting challenge than the outdoor portions — the 21mm aisle shot at ISO 1000 was the limit of what I was comfortable with in terms of noise — but the results held up. Wedding photography is one of those disciplines where the conditions are never quite what you would choose and the margin for error is essentially zero, and on this occasion the weather, the location and the people were all, in their different ways, cooperative.
The Fujifilm X-Pro 2 is a 24MP APS-C mirrorless camera with a hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, released in 2016. The XF 16-55mm f/2.8 R LM WR is a constant-aperture standard zoom equivalent to 24–84mm in full-frame terms, weather-resistant, and released in 2015.
