Lauren & Tom | Willow Marsh Farm, Leicestershire
Willow Marsh Farm · Leicestershire
A Documentary Wedding Story
A summer wedding at Willow Marsh Farm in Leicestershire — a barn with a wall of glass, a meadow full of coloured smoke, and two people who were certain they hated having their photograph taken.
The Morning
I had met Lauren and Tom the year before for a pre-wedding shoot, which is something I recommend to anyone who is nervous, self-conscious or convinced they are bad at having their photograph taken. These two were all three, cheerfully and openly, and an hour in a field beforehand fixed it entirely.
By the wedding morning there was nothing to fix. They were relaxed, the weather was doing exactly what it had been asked to, and the day started well ahead of schedule.
The Ceremony
They married with everybody packed in close, which is the best way to do it. Somewhere in the first thirty seconds Tom stopped worrying about anything at all, and it shows in every frame after that.
On the pre-wedding shoot, since it comes up in almost every enquiry: it is not about getting nice photographs, although you do. It is about the two of you finding out that being photographed while you talk to each other is not the ordeal you are expecting, and about me finding out how you are with each other when nobody is watching. An hour spent on that is worth more on the wedding day than any shot list.
Willow Marsh Farm
Willow Marsh Farm sits in the Leicestershire countryside near Loughborough — a converted farm with a beamed barn on one side and a glazed reception space on the other that opens straight out onto the fields.
That glass is the reason it works so well. Most barns are gloriously atmospheric and extremely dark; here you get the beams and the brick, and then a whole wall of daylight beside it. It means you can photograph a speech in a barn without lighting it, which is not something I can say about most of them.
Willow Marsh Farm is one of the better barn venues in the Midlands, largely because of the glazed reception space — you get the character of a barn without losing all your daylight. If you are choosing a venue, the guides cover the places I photograph most often, and there is more work like this in the portfolio.
Venue guides View the portfolioSmoke in the Field
And then out into the meadow with coloured smoke grenades, because the light was doing something worth using and everybody was in the mood.
Smoke lasts about ninety seconds and does whatever the wind tells it to. The trick is to get the sun behind it so the colour lights up rather than going flat, put people in front, and then stop directing entirely — the good frames come from what happens when a group of adults realise they have been handed something that makes coloured smoke.
Dinner and the Speeches
Dinner in the barn under the neon, and speeches that were funny and heartfelt in the right order.
Almost none of the frames I keep from a set of speeches are of the person speaking. They are of the room: the friend who has heard the story before and is already going, the mother reaching for a napkin, the table at the back that has entirely lost composure.
Confetti and the Party
A confetti tunnel of guests, a first dance, and then a barn full of people who had absolutely no intention of going home early. It ran late and finished loud.
A confetti tunnel indoors is worth mentioning because it is easy to get wrong. Guests instinctively stand too far apart and throw too early, so the couple walk through a gap. Ask everyone to close right up and throw high rather than forward, and you get a proper storm of it instead of a light sprinkle — which is exactly what happened here.
Lauren and Tom, thank you. For the pre-wedding shoot that proved you did not need one, and for a day that ran exactly the way you wanted it to.
There is more work like this in the portfolio, and the venue guides go into detail on the venues I know best.
Ceremony & reception: Willow Marsh Farm, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE12
Photography: Oliver Holder
Planning your own barn or countryside wedding? I would love to hear about it.
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