It’s always good to be back at Grinkle Park Hotel, a venue I’ve photographed weddings at for many years now, and this time it was for Ian and Karen’s Twilight wedding. Rather than having photography running from preparations first thing in the morning right through until late at night, a Twilight wedding gives you a more compact wedding day, with everything happening later and the photography concentrating on the parts of the day that matter most to the couple.

One of the things I make a real point of explaining to couples at their pre-wedding meeting is how I actually work on the wedding day. In fact, I probably exaggerate the point slightly because I want couples to know exactly what they're booking me for. I'm not going to spend the day constantly posing you, moving your hands around, tilting your head into exactly the right position or repeatedly telling you where to look. That's never been how I photograph weddings, and for the vast majority of couples I meet, the response when I explain it is usually something along the lines of, “Good, that's exactly what we want.”

Not every wedding needs to begin first thing in the morning and continue until the last person leaves the dance floor. Some weddings are much smaller and simpler, with the important part of the day concentrated into just a few hours, and Nathan and Emma's wedding at Middlesbrough Town Hall was a lovely example of exactly that.