HAYLEY & JAKE

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY SYDNEY

Hayley and Jake - both from the UK, are one of those annoying couples who have everything; they are amazingly friendly, good looking, hone positive perspectives on life, they have good jobs (Hayley is a veterinary nurse and Jake owns a crossfit gym) and both had the gonads to leave the UK for a better life in Australia.

It’s a country which I’ve travelled to for other work and I can honestly say I love the place. The weather is mostly sunny which therefore enables everyone to have a great outdoor lifestyle, unlike here in the UK with our pathetic excuse for a summer. Naturally, when they planned their wedding they opted for their home down under rather than travel to the other side of the world to the northern hemisphere which obviously got a gigantic, baseball-fan-foam-hand thumbs up from me.

Forward-wind to the morning of their wedding and it looked like they made the wrong choice; it hacked it down. I’m not talking drizzle or lingering, miserable rain; I mean the type of fat droplet rain that comes down in litres, saturating everything within seconds. I was a little concerned, I had travelled to the other side of the planet for this one and, it being held at the tail end of their summer, you’d kind of expect it to be nice. Luckily, like most fat droplet rain, it didn’t last long and wound up going from hazy sunshine during the day to a stunning golden hour shoot in the evening.

Their ceremony and reception was held outside on the decking at Valcluse Yacht Club - a stones throw from Sydney Harbour in a beautiful little spot called Watsons Bay. As with all weddings offering free alcohol, things rapidly descended into drunken chaos - most of the guests were all dribbling wrecks by about 9pm whereas the hardcore few stayed up for games of drink and pass* until well after midnight.

In my humble opinion, this was how a wedding should be, really informal, everyone drinking beers during the ceremony with no designated areas to sit and, if I were to mark it on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best), this was like an 11.

Thanks dudes for having me - it was a pleasure.

Oh, forgive me for sounding like a millennial or an annoying Radio 1 DJ, I’d like to give a special shout out / props to Voli K who smashed it with the music and Ben Ager who nailed the ceremony in true style.

*Sip and pass is exactly what it says on the tin; usually involving a bottle of gin / something similar; sipping it, passing it over to the next person until the whole bottle is gone.