Journal

We have been waiting to share this particular wedding for a while now, since last winter in fact.  Various things came up and so we delayed doing so because we had an unusual thought about how to present it, which we didn’t want to rush.

Maike and I have often discussed how challenging it would be to shoot an entire wedding in black and white. Of course this is nothing unusual if you consider a time when there was no colour film, but in todays wedding context it would be highly unusual. We couldn’t imagine a client that would agree to it and actually, thanks to digital, they really don’t have to.

When we began editing Nick and Michelle’s wedding we started to see that a large portion of the images suited a monochrome look.  Their wedding was held in the dead of winter on a bitterly cold and wet weekend at Olive Rock, just outside Tulbagh, South Africa. There was snow on the mountains all around us, the sky was moody and the light was crisp. It was not a typical wedding day for us. Now editing for black and white is surely different to shooting specifically for it, but in some way we feel like we must have had it in the back of our minds. Many of the pictures were graphically strong with large shadow areas and people placed in little spots of winter light. We don’t always shoot like this but for some reason we did this day.

Your first thought might be that a dark moody colourless look may not suit a colour-rich and joyful wedding celebration, but once you look through this collection, we think you’ll start to see the charm and simplicity in the range of grey and pure black tones. There is love and joy and even a vibrancy to this day, which is not held back by the lack of colour. In fact, we think colour may have been a distraction from what is actually being shown in some of these pictures.

We hope you enjoy them.