One of the questions I'm asked fairly regularly is how many hours of wedding photography somebody actually needs, and there isn't really a standard answer because there isn't such a thing as a standard wedding. A small afternoon ceremony at a registry office with twenty guests is completely different from a wedding where preparations start first thing in the morning and everybody is still on the dance floor late into the evening, so it doesn't make much sense to assume they both need exactly the same photography coverage.

Not every wedding needs a photographer there from breakfast until everybody is barefoot on the dance floor at midnight.

I probably shouldn't say that as somebody who makes his living photographing weddings, but it's true.

Some weddings are naturally shorter. Some couples aren't particularly interested in photographs of getting ready in the morning, while others are planning a later ceremony and want their photography to concentrate on the ceremony, their guests and the celebrations afterwards. Sometimes a couple simply wants a really good record of the most important few hours without booking somebody for the entire day.

One of the things I tell couples all the time is that your wedding isn't a photoshoot. You haven't invited all your favourite people, spent months planning everything and probably spent a frightening amount of money just so I can drag you around for three hours taking photographs. I want you to enjoy your wedding, enjoying it with everybody else, not spending half of it wondering when the photographer is finally going to leave you alone.

Wedding photography has changed enormously since I started photographing weddings 18 years ago. Cameras have changed, editing has changed, social media has completely changed the way people see wedding photographs and, every few years, another style seems to become the thing everybody suddenly wants. Some of those changes have been brilliant and I've happily adopted them myself, while others have come and gone almost as quickly as they appeared.

I've never really had a problem with trends. Weddings should be personal, photography should evolve and it would be pretty boring if every wedding photograph still looked exactly as it did when I first started. What I do think is worth remembering, though, is that your wedding photographs have a much longer life than most wedding trends. Something that looks incredibly fashionable on Instagram today still needs to mean something when you're looking at it in ten, twenty or forty years' time.