Sammy & Alex | A Mount Without Wedding
The Mount Without · Bristol · September
The Mount Without · Bristol · Shot on the Leica Q3
A September wedding in a former medieval church in the heart of Bristol. Peeling plaster, a faded teal fresco, candlelit banquet tables and a crypt that turned into the best dance floor of the year.
The Morning
Sammy got ready in a warm, relaxed room full of laughter, her bridesmaids easing into the extraordinary burgundy and terracotta dresses that set the tone for everything that followed. Mornings like this are my favourite part of any day. Nothing is happening yet, and everything is about to.
The Ceremony
The ceremony took place in the main hall, and walking in to see that space properly for the first time is something I will not forget. The long aisle, the twin gothic windows with their stained glass at the far end, stone columns marching down either side, and above it all that faded teal fresco of clouds and cherubs, cracked and peeling and all the better for it.
Photographically it gives you everything at once. Extreme contrast from the window light, texture on every surface, and architectural lines that pull your eye straight down the room.
Canapés in the Crypt
Canapés hour spilled between two completely different spaces. Guests gathered under stone arches in the vaulted underground crypt, lit warm by uplighting, then drifted out into the walled garden where the late September light was doing something extraordinary. Two venues in one, effectively.
Dinner & Speeches
Back to the main hall for the wedding breakfast, and the room had been transformed. Long wooden banquet tables candlelit end to end, flowers massed at the altar end on a velvet sofa, the whole space glowing. The speeches were everything they should be, and the light through those windows kept getting better as the afternoon went on.
Portraits
We slipped away for a short while, into the grounds and back inside the church. The frames I keep coming back to are the ones in the pews, the two of them sitting with glasses of wine while the window light fell across them in grids. No direction needed. Just two people enjoying ten quiet minutes.
Into the Night
The evening filled the undercroft with music, espresso martinis and a great deal of dancing, the vaulted arches lit purple and the stone walls ringing with the sound of it. A perfect end to a day that had already given me more than I expected.
If you are considering The Mount Without for your own wedding, I have written a full guide to photographing here, covering the light through the day, how much time to allow, what the crypt and bell tower are like to shoot in, and how the building handles British weather.
Read the venue guideShot on the Leica Q3
I photographed the whole of Sammy and Alex’s day on the Leica Q3, and it is a camera ideally matched to a building like this one.
The fixed 28mm f/1.7 Summilux is wide enough to take in the full sweep of the main hall while still isolating a single face in a crowd wide open. The body is small in a way that full frame DSLRs and most mirrorless cameras simply are not, which matters enormously somewhere this intimate, where guests are close together and I would rather not be noticed.
There is also something in the rendering. The Summilux glass has a smoothness and a three dimensionality in the out of focus areas that I have not found elsewhere, and in a room with this much texture it makes a visible difference.
A Word for Couples Considering It
If you are thinking about getting married here, my advice is to lean into what the building already is rather than trying to soften it. The peeling walls and the ancient stone are not problems to be styled away. They are the reason to book it. A couple of long wooden tables and some candles and the room is finished. The rest is yours. There is more on all of this in my Mount Without wedding photographer guide.
It works across every season, but September was particularly kind. The garden still green, and the late afternoon light doing remarkable things through those windows.
Sammy and Alex, thank you for having me. This was one of the most visually rich days I have ever had behind a camera, and I am still not over that ceiling.
Venue: The Mount Without, Bristol
Camera: Leica Q3
Photography: Oliver Holder