Paul & Bernice’s Guisborough Wedding | St Nicholas Church & Guisborough Priory
Being based where I am, there’s always something particularly nice about photographing a wedding close to home. I spend a lot of my year travelling around North Yorkshire and the North East for weddings, so when I get the opportunity to photograph a day in Guisborough, surrounded by places I’ve known for years, it feels that little bit different. Paul and Bernice’s wedding was exactly that, with their ceremony taking place at St Nicholas Church in Guisborough followed by photographs with their family in the historic surroundings of Guisborough Priory.
St Nicholas is such a beautiful setting for a wedding ceremony. Sitting right in the heart of Guisborough, it’s a church that many local people will have walked past hundreds of times without perhaps stopping to appreciate just how much character it has. On a wedding day it really comes into its own. There’s something about a traditional church ceremony that still feels incredibly special, particularly when you have family and friends filling the pews and two people standing at the front about to begin the next chapter of their lives together.
Paul and Bernice’s ceremony had exactly that feeling. It wasn’t about creating a spectacle for the camera or trying to make every second picture-perfect. It was simply about the two of them getting married, surrounded by the people who mattered to them, and that gave me the freedom to photograph things in the way I enjoy most.
After photographing weddings for almost two decades, I’ve become much more interested in what happens around the obvious moments. Of course I’m watching when the rings are exchanged and when the couple share that first kiss as husband and wife, but at the same time I’m looking around the church. Somebody is nearly always smiling at something happening a few rows away, a parent is watching with an expression the couple themselves can't see, or two family members catch each other's eye for a fraction of a second. Those aren't moments I can organise or recreate afterwards, which is exactly why I enjoy documentary wedding photography so much.
Once Paul and Bernice were officially married, we didn't have far to go for the next part of their story. Guisborough Priory gave us a fantastic setting for their family photographs and a chance to make the most of one of the most recognisable historic landmarks in the town.
I've known Guisborough Priory for years, but putting a bride and groom in front of those incredible ruins makes you look at it differently. The scale of the Priory gives photographs an almost timeless quality, yet because you're right in the centre of Guisborough it still feels very much connected to the place and to the people who live here. We were also blessed with some lovely sunshine, which brought the stonework, greenery and blue sky together beautifully.
What I particularly liked was being able to use the Priory for the family photographs rather than simply treating it as somewhere to take Paul and Bernice away on their own. Family photographs are sometimes dismissed as the formal part of a wedding gallery, but I've never really looked at them that way. As the years pass, those photographs can become some of the most important pictures from the entire wedding. People change, families grow and sadly there will eventually be people in those photographs who are no longer around. Having everyone together in one place on a day like this is something worth recording properly.
That doesn't mean they have to become a military operation either. I've always tried to keep family photographs relaxed and get through them without everyone feeling as though they've spent half the wedding standing in a line waiting for me. With somewhere like Guisborough Priory as the backdrop, there was also no need to overcomplicate things. The location already gave the photographs everything they needed.
That's probably a good description of how I approach wedding photography generally. I don't believe a photographer needs to take over a wedding to produce beautiful photographs. There will always be moments when I'll offer a little direction, move somebody slightly because the light is better or suggest we use a particular location, but for most of the day I'd much rather let people get on with enjoying themselves.
The photographs I've selected from Paul and Bernice's wedding are a good example of why. There's the grandeur of St Nicholas Church, the history and scale of Guisborough Priory and some beautiful traditional wedding photographs, but underneath all of that are simply two people enjoying the fact that they've just got married. That's what matters.
One of the benefits of being a Guisborough wedding photographer is knowing the area rather than arriving and immediately having to work out where everything is. Guisborough has some wonderful locations for wedding photography, and having St Nicholas Church and Guisborough Priory so close together means it's possible to create photographs with two completely different looks without taking a couple away from their wedding for hours or spending half the day travelling between locations.
That's important to me because I've never wanted wedding photography to become the wedding itself. Couples spend months, and sometimes years, planning a day surrounded by the people they love. The last thing I want to do is whisk them away for an enormous photoshoot while everybody they've invited is somewhere else enjoying the celebration. I'll always make time for portraits and family photographs, but I want the experience of having them taken to become another enjoyable part of the day rather than something that interrupts it.
Paul and Bernice were brilliant in that respect. Everything felt comfortable and uncomplicated, and looking back through the photographs afterwards, I think that comes across. Nothing needed to be overdone. We had a beautiful church, an incredible historic location just around the corner, lovely weather and, most importantly, a couple surrounded by their family on one of the biggest days of their lives.
There's another reason I wanted to share this particular wedding on the Discovery Photography blog. A lot of the weddings people see online take place at huge country houses and purpose-built wedding venues, and they're wonderful places to photograph. I've worked at many of them myself. But you don't need a sprawling estate or an enormous wedding to create photographs that mean something.
A wedding in your own town, at a church your family knows, followed by photographs somewhere you've probably walked through countless times, can have an entirely different significance. Those locations aren't simply attractive backgrounds; they're part of where you're from. Years later, when Paul and Bernice look back at their photographs, St Nicholas Church and Guisborough Priory will still be there and those places will forever be connected to their wedding day.
That's something I really like about photographing local weddings.
I'm fortunate that my work takes me throughout North Yorkshire, Teesside and the North East, but Guisborough is right on my doorstep and I've photographed many weddings in and around the town over the years. Every one has been different because ultimately the location is only the backdrop. It's the people who give a wedding its personality.
Paul and Bernice, thank you for trusting me to capture yours. It was a genuine pleasure spending the day with you and your family, photographing your ceremony at St Nicholas Church and then having the opportunity to use Guisborough Priory for those family photographs afterwards. I hope the images bring back not only how everything looked, but exactly how it felt to stand there surrounded by the people closest to you.
Congratulations to you both, and thank you for allowing Discovery Photography to be a small part of your story.
If you're planning your own wedding at St Nicholas Church in Guisborough, a ceremony elsewhere in the town, or you're looking for a Guisborough wedding photographer who works in a relaxed and natural way, I'd love to hear what you're planning. My approach is simple: I'll give you direction when you need it, disappear into the background when you don't, and concentrate on creating photographs that still mean something long after the wedding day itself has passed.
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