It’s not until something is over that you really look back…and now that I’ve just shot my 600th and last wedding, I have time to do that!

This is a long post, a kind of retrospective of my time photographing weddings. So let me start with thanking all 600 couples whose weddings I shot between 2007 & 2024! I was asked by a couple who were guests at my last wedding this past weekend, what makes a good wedding, is it the venue, location? I didn’t hesitate when I said it’s the people. And it really is. You have to be a people person to photograph weddings well and it’s the people, the couple, families, friends what makes a wedding. Otherwise it’s just a venue in a location! So thank you all, all 600 of you (& naturally your families & friends).

I heard something a couple of weeks ago at a work event, from a mid-twenties guy, who said he’d been in the job two years or so and had seen it all. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself! 18 years of weddings, 600 different couples, 600 weddings..yeah I have seen it all when it comes to weddings! I’ve photographed weddings when the worlds economy collapsed, when the whole country froze over for two winters straight (2009/2010 & 2011…driving around then was fun!), when the Icelandic volcano stopped all flights (Tracy & John’s wedding!), & when the whole world stopped for the pandemic & then recovered by having weddings on every day imaginable!

It was sometime around the Monaco Grand Prix of 2006 I got it into my head I may leave F1 to shoot weddings at home…a strange place to come up with this idea, as it’s one of the best places in the world to photograph a Formula 1 car, especially back in 2006! It was July of the same year I decided I would definitely leave F1 at the end of the season & move back home to do weddings, and weddings alone.

I started shooting weddings on my own in April 2007. Wedding photography wasn’t what it is now, it wasn’t cool, or hip to be a wedding photographer. It was mainly older men, that were kind of bossy that shot weddings! At the time I started, I was probably the youngest wedding photographer in Ireland. I was quite younger than my couples! I did my own thing, learning from the best wedding photographers around the world & emulating what they did here in Ireland. So I was a wedding photographer at the end of the Celtic Tiger (most of which I missed being in the UK at the time), I went full-time just as the worlds economy crashed, then thrived as the economy slowly improved. I was one of the youngest to now being one of the longest working wedding photographers! I learned very early on to not take every wedding job that came my way – not every wedding is suited to you! Ultimately that worked in my favour as I mostly shot couples that knew my work and liked it!

Facebook business pages was super new, so I learned to deal with that as it became more & more popular as the years went on. Blogs were pretty new, but I started with one of those right away, not knowing what to put into it, but did it anyway. Little did I know I was learning what would become SEO and digital marketing on the fly! I went from coding my own website, on this same domain, in html first, before going to Microsoft FrontPage, before drag & drop WordPress templates made things quicker, easier & way better looking! Something called Instagram then started & as it was designed for photographers, I had to join that too! In 2022 I finally got a certificate in digital marketing from ATU Sligo, reaffirming that everything I had taught myself over the years was actually right!

My style of wedding photography has never changed too much. I never got into what was trendy at the time, I kept my images clean, sharp, well composted much like my Formula 1 stuff had to be. Which is why as I look through my past weddings going back to 2007, most of the images hold up today and look great! That’s what I aimed for. Naturally I improved, but my style remained the same!

In terms of marketing, I was never into advertising in papers (yes that was the main way to advertise then!), going more or less all in with word of mouth referrals, and then the blog, website, Facebook & Instagram all combining to help push my name out there in the real world and move to the top of Google rankings. I did wedding fairs for the first few years but after a few years of that learned they weren’t exactly for me or the type of clients I wanted to work with, so stopped going to them – but I have to say I met some great suppliers at them and did get some real good weddings from them early on that ultimately led to more via referrals!

I did workshops in Ireland & abroad to learn from the best, I jumped into online workshops when they started (ie when internet connections became fast enough to live stream!) & picked up all sorts of great ideas and tweaked a few to suit my needs. Way back before it was a thing, I’m going say 2010, I brought my own 24 inch iMac to every wedding and ran same day slideshows. Never wanting to make guests have to watch the slideshow or slow down the evening for the bands, I ran the iMac in a corner of the ballroom where guests could come & go & watch as many times before I left after the first dance! It was one of the best marketing things I’ve ever done, although for a while it was a bit stressful quickly editing 80 or so images during the meal but I got used to that quickly!

I started in 2007 with Canon 5D cameras (best ever jpg file), went onto the Canon 5D mk2 version, Canon 5Dmk3 (the best one!), Canon 5Dmk4 before the R series mirrorless! I started as a PC person, before jumping ship to Apple’s iMac & still use a stand alone machine running OS Sierra & actually own a copy of Photoshop CS6 which is my workhorse program- no subscriptions for me! I’ve been a jpg shooter since day one, and will continue to be – I was taught to get it right in camera & had to when shooting Velvia film back in the day!

I learned my work ethic for long wedding days, quite often up to 18 hours, from my time working in Formula 1. At the time I photographed in F1, there were no restrictions on mechanics working, the paddock was always full, testing was unlimited and year round, so there was always something to get sent to whether you liked it or not! But I look back on that now & thank my old boss Keith Sutton for that, as much as I hated it at the time! I also learned to deal with people in F1, which is a notoriously brutal & hard sport, most top level sports are – people are focused on what they do, and like to get on & do it. I spent two years as Toyota F1’s photographer, spending one session per race weekend in the garage up close to the drivers, two years…and in those two years neither Ralf Schumacher nor Jarno Trulli, the drivers, ever said hello to me!

Thankfully most wedding couples have been great. I still meet old clients every now & then, and chances are, I’ll not only remember them, but remember when their wedding was before they do!! Of course not every wedding was like that – there were plenty where I was just the photographer, where I came, did the best job I could, left & delivered what I had to & maybe never seen or heard from the couple again. Some jobs are like that & working in F1 prep’d me for just getting on with it. But again, I’m very thankful to have met some amazing couples & people from all over Ireland & the world who got married in front of my cameras!

Again from that work ethic of F1, doing whatever was necessary on the wedding day just came naturally to me. Whether helping out with ironing, drying bouquets of flowers, pushing cars, giving lifts to groomsmen when their classic car wouldn’t start, puffing out the brides train when needed (at most weddings!), time keeper, weather forecaster, I did whatever was required and after all I was doing it nearly every weekend so knew what was needed! Melissa, a previous bride, said it best – “Mark, I always tell everyone you were the best planner and time keeper on our wedding day!”

If you’ve made it this far in this long post, well done! Right now, I’m finished with wedding photography. But never say never! When I left F1 behind at the end of the 2006 season I thought that was it, but a couple of years later I made one more appearance in the paddock filling in for an old colleague, at the British Grand Prix in 2009. I unfortunately needed another photographer to help & step in for me at a wedding when my dad passed away last year, still the only event in nearly 25 years I had to miss. So if you’re a photographer reading this, put me on your emergency contact list, if it ever comes to it, give me a shout, as I’d never leave a couple needing a wedding photographer in an emergency. And if you’re a wedding photographer without an emergency contact list, get one, as you never know what can happen.

I might be finished with weddings, but I’m very much still taking pictures & being a photographer. I’m just focusing more on portraits and headshots. So see you around Strandhill & in the water surfing, as chances are that’s where you’ll find me!!

Mark, November 2024- Strandhill, Ireland

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