Getting ready at Claridge’s, vows in the Rossetti Room at Chelsea Old Town Hall, a beer to sit out the rain, and a Louboutin that very nearly did not make it home from Bond Street station.

Fifty guests, three hours and one very good pub. Patrick and Ruby were married at The Alma Tavern in Clifton — the corner of Bristol where they first started going out — by a friend, in front of everybody who mattered.

A concrete modernist church in Clifton, portraits on the Downs with the Suspension Bridge behind, a wedding breakfast in the front room of a Clifton pub, and a ceilidh across the water in Bedminster.

Childhood sweethearts, a morning in a Clifton townhouse, vows under a peeling teal ceiling in a former medieval church, speeches from the pulpit and a crypt full of people dancing until the small hours.

Weddings give you a run sheet. Proposals give you none of that. You get one attempt, one person who has no idea, and a plan that has usually been living inside somebody's head for months.

That is the part people do not expect when they get in touch. They think they are booking a photographer. What they are actually booking is someone to help them think it through.

A London wedding with so much heart. Kate and Brendan started the day at home, then Brendan and I jumped on the Tube across the city to one of the capital’s most characterful venues, RSA House just off the Strand.

A London wedding with two of the city's finest backdrops. A Westminster Room ceremony at Old Marylebone Town Hall, then the whole party loaded onto a bus to Brunswick House in Vauxhall for a long, joyful night on the dance floor.

A wild, outdoor wedding on a working nature reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. Big Kent skies, hares in the long grass, a barn with its doors thrown open onto the marsh, and two people so visibly in love with each other and their guests that the day practically photographed itself.

An intimate Hotel du Vin Tunbridge Wells wedding in the heart of Kent. Full of warmth, easy laughter and the kind of family energy that makes a documentary wedding photographer’s job an absolute pleasure.

A Chelsea Old Town Hall wedding with the whole party loaded onto a Routemaster, a confetti shower under the flower archway on the King’s Road, and a night at The Other House in Kensington that nobody wanted to end.

A morning of pale blue and champagne, vows in a barn full of light, lawn games and a very determined pageboy, and speeches under the chandeliers that had the whole room on its feet.

A December wedding in the Council Chamber at Islington Town Hall, a vintage Rolls-Royce on Upper Street, dinner by candlelight in the vaults beneath the Royal Exchange, and a second half danced in kente.

A small wedding at Chelsea Old Town Hall, confetti under the flower archway on the King’s Road, a corner shop stop in full black tie, and an evening that proved a short guest list has nothing to do with how big a day feels.

A ceremony at St Mary’s Bourne Street in Pimlico, confetti on the pavement, champagne outside the Fox & Hounds in Belgravia, and a candlelit evening at Brunswick House that nobody wanted to end.

There are venues that are pretty. There are venues that are atmospheric. And then, very occasionally, there are venues that feel like they were built specifically to be photographed — places where the light behaves differently, where every stone tells a story, and where the backdrop does as much work as the people in front of it. The Mount Without in Bristol is one of those places.