As an expert in photographing weddings at Chelsea Register Office, many of my clients are international folks living in London. Yet in the many many weddings I have photographed at Chelsea Register Office, I have never yet had German clients. As a German national myself, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to finally have some German clients. Not only that, but this lovely couple don’t even live in London. They just fancied getting married here, having had some lovely holidays here. What a great idea!
Now I still speak German fluently, even though I have lived here in London for over 30 years… but it’s strange how specific “wedding vocabulary” is. I was shocked to find that I was occasionally missing the right words for directing the couples during their portraits, or guiding the guests in the group photos – the slight mis-use in words certainly led to a few giggles on the day. But we managed to work it out.
Anyway, it was lovely to photograph a wedding at Chelsea Register Office with a wedding party made of entirely of my fellow German countrymen and women. It certainly helped in trying to get smiles out of little baby Maya – although I think she was more interested in the biscuits on offer during the ceremony than anything I had to say, German or otherwise 🙂
After the ceremony and the traditional group photographs on the Chelsea Register Office steps, I was introduced to a lovely German wedding custom that I had not come across before: The couple are given a big bed sheet with a heart painted on it and start cutting along the fabric in opposite directions until they meet in the middle, having cut out the whole heart. It’s a race to see who can get around their half first. And then they step through the heart-shaped hole in the sheet together. I didn’t know what was going at first when they frantically started cutting at the fabric until someone explained it to me… what a fun idea!
After this little ritual, and some local portraits around Chelsea, the wedding couple and I headed off towards Kensington, where the wedding reception was to be held at super cool boutique hotel The Kensington Hotel. The bride and groom had spent a lot of time around Kensington so we took to the local streets for this set of wedding portraits, before the bride and group rejoined their guests for the reception and a fabulous looking cold buffet. Many congratulations to Sarah and Manual, and of course little Maya.
