About
Elena Marsh
I photograph weddings the way I would want mine photographed: quietly, and mostly from the edge of the room.
How I ended up doing this
For six years I photographed restaurant kitchens for a food magazine. It is loud, cramped, badly lit work where nobody has time to pose and nothing can be repeated, and it turned out to be the best possible training for a wedding.
A friend asked me to shoot hers in 2014 because the photographer had cancelled. I said yes on the condition that she did not expect anything staged. She still has the picture of her father sitting down halfway through his speech, and so do I.
Two hundred-odd weddings later the approach has not really changed. I turn up early, I learn everyone’s names, and then I try very hard to become furniture.
I take a limited number of weddings a year so that each one gets the whole week around it — the planning calls, the day itself, and the editing while it is still fresh.
Quickly, then
Coffee or tea
Coffee until eleven, then tea, then coffee again at four. It is not a system.
Camera
Two bodies, three primes. Nothing that needs explaining.
The dog
A lurcher called Bruno who is not allowed at weddings and knows it.
Furthest job
A farmhouse outside Rovinj. Fourteen hours door to door and I would go again tomorrow.
First dance song you hear most
"At Last". It has never once been a bad choice.
What I actually photograph
The parents. Every time. They are the ones who will want it in ten years.
Galleries
We had said we did not want a photographer following us around. Then we did not notice her all day, and got back four hundred pictures of our own wedding.
Priya & Tom · Suffolk, June
