A bit about me

 

 

I’ve been a photographer since I was 14 years old.  You’re too polite to ask the obvious question, but suffice to say that means I’ve been taking photos for a while. I began in the good old days of film photography, learning on an old manual camera my grandad gave me.  As a teenager I developed black and white film in the bathroom and turned my bedroom into a darkroom in order to enlarge prints.  Like most photographers, I’d say that the bug bites you when you make your first print -that’s the moment that you realise you are creating something magical.

I loved the arrival of digital photography, and don’t miss the darkroom at all (those chemicals were a bit harsh on the skin).  I still love to print my own photographs, but these days it’s on an inkjet printer – although it still feels a big magical when the print turns out just how you envisioned it.

I wanted to be a professional photographer when I was still at school but, as these things tend to do, it took me a while to get there.  I went off to University, did a few jobs for thirteen years, then set up Martin Hambleton Photography in 2003.

To be a good wedding photographer you need two quite different sets of skills.  You must know what you are doing with the equipment – you must understand light, how to shape it, control it, mold it to help you achieve the shot you want, which means understanding how a camera works and being able to tell it what to do.  Modern cameras can do a lot of the thinking for you, which is fine a lot of the time, but in crucial situations you need to be able to think beyond what an electronic box of tricks wants to do, and tell it to do what you want it to.  I learned all that so long ago that I don’t really have to think about it these days – it just comes automatically.  My experience and expertise mean that I can work quickly – a wedding is such a fast-moving event that you can’t be wasting time thinking about what you’re going to do with the camera.  If you’re too slow, the moment has gone and the shot has been lost.

The other skill is to be able to put people at their ease in front a camera.  Above all else a wedding is about people.  First and foremost, it’s about the couple getting married of course.  I always make sure that I create a set of portraits of them, and their love for each other, which will form the centrepoint of a wedding album.  But it’s also about their friends and families, those people special enough to the couple to be invited to share the celebration of the day.  I work subtly and without fuss, blending into proceedings as much as possible so that guests quickly become used to me (and my camera) being there.  They become comfortable in my presence and get on with the important stuff – having a good time.  And when the time comes to take some formal groups, I use the same skills, of working at speed and making people feel relaxed, so that the shots, although posed, look natural.

Please read the comments on the testimonials page, which will tell you about how I go about photographing a wedding day.  Look at the images in the wedding galleries and on the blog posts.  Study the moments I’ve seen and captured.  See how relaxed the people look, many of them unaware of the camera only a short distance from them.  Look at the faces of the people in the group shots, smiling naturally because they’re happy to be part of a special day, and not grinning fixedly because they’ve been told to or have been standing waiting for ages.  They’re not being asked to jump around, act foolishly or pose awkwardly – they’re recorded being part of the day, being themselves and enjoying the occasion.

I love doing this job.  It really is a great honour, and very flattering, to be asked to photograph a wedding.  It is a great joy to be asked to be part of a couple’s special day and to provide them with the lasting memento of their wedding.